/Advancement in Victorian Lit/ will examine the themes of progress, motion, and self-improvement in British literary work of the 19th century. Though we’ll focus on the novel as a form (and as a forum for the values of social mobility), we’ll also read short stories, correspondence, sermons, and occasional essays in order to recreate the national mood of an empire in which everything seemed possible: poverty eradicated, education for all, railroads creating an early information superhighway.

Amidst breakneck change, and blinding speed, Victorian fiction laid out a national character and an aesthetic charter that, in some sense, still holds; when most people today think of a novel, they’re thinking of the novel that the Victorians invented.

*Student Learning Goals*

Throughout the quarter, we will come to know some things about the art
of writing fiction--how stories are built, what they can do, why they
might matter-- and some other things about the art of reading it.
Furthermore, we will build a familiarity with the particularities of our
elected period: what life was like (and thereby what art was like) in in
Britain under Queen Victoria, and find en route some keys to unlocking
fiction as a genre whose chief (though not sole) benefit is delight.
Importantly, we’ll also learn to engage written texts critically: to
think forcefully, and to write well.
**
*General Method of Instruction*

This course’s approach to mastery is pluriform. We’ll have lectures,
site-visits, dramatic readings, guest speakers and frequent (compelling)
class-discussion, for which you are expected to prepare and in which you
are required to participate. No spectators.

*Recommended Preparation*

Reading long passages of fiction can be taxing and time-consuming, and
active participation in class discussion can require inordinate
preparation. For those of you who are slower readers (like me) I
recommend getting the books as soon as you can, and starting all of
them. It will be better for you to have read the first 5 chapters of
each text, rather than completing one of them. Start early; read
carefully; annotate freely.

*Class Assignments and Grading*

Engagement is the first assignment, and reading, the second. Beyond
that, expect (3) short papers (4-5 pgs.) which will undergo significant
revision in response to peer and instructor feedback, in accordance with
the university’s “W” requirement, a weekly reading journal, and an
in-class presentation.

*Texts*

Jude the Obscureby Thomas Hardy
Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens
Selected Writingsby John Ruskin
Selected Letters of Charlotte Bronteed. Margaret Smith

Get books online: http://astore.amazon.com/classreadings-20
Or at UW Bookstore

English 200 is designed to offer techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience. Our class will focus on texts that have filled two specific roles: that of a literary text and that of work of Christian apologetics. What happens when Christian doctrine takes on the form of literary artifact? What stake do we, as readers, have in the relationship between the two? In what ways have changing historical circumstances required adjustments in the texts' Christian themes?

We will explore these questions by looking at a variety of texts and genres. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to building a critical vocabulary for talking about literature. We will read John Bunyan's classic allegoryThe Pilgrim's Progress and selections from Milton's Paradise Lost—a book-length poem that claimed its purpose was "to justify the ways of God to man"—and its sequel, Paradise Regained. In the second half, we will read two novels: G. K. Chesterton's anarchist mystery The Man Who was Thursday and C. S. Lewis's Perelandra, which is a science fiction retelling of Paradise Lost set on Venus. We will close the quarter with Donald Miller's bestselling turn-of-the-millennium memoir, Blue Like Jazz. Throughout, we will also consider other kinds of texts, which may include poems, films, and historically significant sermons.

CLARIFICATION: This is a class about how key Christian ideas play into English literature, not a class on Christian religion. Therefore we won't be evaluating or criticizing our readings based on their religious content, but rather on how that content works in texts. We may, however, occasionally refer to parts of the Christian scriptures as a means of providing context for our readings.

This course meets the University’s “W” requirement, which means you will produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. You will satisfy this requirement by writing two 5-7 page papers, due at the middle and at the end of the quarter. Both papers will be read and commented on with revision in mind.

Course Readings:
Course pack, including shorter readings and critical texts (available the first week of the quarter at Ave Copy, 4141 University Way)
John Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress (Norton). 978-0393927719
John Milton. Paradise Lost (Oxford World's Classics). 978-0199535743
G. K. Chesterton. The Man Who Was Thursday (Penguin). 978-0140183887
C. S. Lewis. Perelandra (Scribner). 978-0743234917
Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz. 978-0199535743

When thinking about the gothic genre one often conjures up images of dark sinister villains, brooding heroes, damsels in distress, and supernatural creatures such as vampires and ghosts. How did the word become so loaded and associated with the idea of psychological and visceral fears and anxieties? What are the defining characteristic of the gothic aesthetic? What shapes it? What is lost and/or gained when it becomes something more famliar, concrete and recognizable?

In order to explore these questions, we will read a variety of forms of literature including, novels, poems, short stories, and plays. Our readings will span several hundred years, the oldest being a Greek tragedy from the 5th century B.C. (Aeschylus’ Eumenides) and the most recent work being from the late 19th century. What these works all have in common are specific conventions, episodes, figures and characters, among other things, which make them important in the evolution of the gothic genre.

Throughout our readings we will explore the idea of the haunted figure. Through this archetype we will be able to see common gothic motifs in literature which we perhaps do not necessarily view as “gothic,” which will help us not only better understand the term as applied to literary works, but it will help us better appreciate how literary genres develop throughout history.

In order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to complete ten to fifteen pages of out of class writing, with revision.

Required Course Materials
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Norton Edition, ISBN 978-0-393-92754-2
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Norton Edition, ISBN 978-0-393-97850-6
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Norton Edition, ISBN 978-0-393-97889-6
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Norton Edition, ISBN 978-0-393-97786-8
Course Reader, Available at The Ave. Copy Center. 4141 University Way NE.

The novels listed above will be available at the UW Bookstore, but if you choose to purchase your materials elsewhere, please use the ISBN numbers provided here. It is important that you obtain these editions since they contain required secondary criticism.

This course examines how immigrant experience simultaneously contests and consolidates the meaning and configuration of familial relations in the 20th century U.S. history. To that end, we will focus on the question of how literature functions as an alternative site for narrating history and a place to imagine differences against the rigid understanding of a family as a heteronormative institution formed upon a nuclear, middle class, patriarchal household model. We will also study how not only social and cultural values but also political regimes affect circulation, transfiguration, or rupture of immigrants’ memory of home and family. To develop practices of critical interpretation of these questions in literature, we will study a selection of novels along with other forms such as short stories, memoirs, and film.
Students’ responsibility in this course includes three short papers and one final paper to meet the W-course requirement, besides of a regular contribution to class discussion, a collaborative presentation, discussion-leadings, quizzes, and substantial daily reading.

Course Texts:
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers (1925), ISBN 978-0892552900
Murayam, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body (1988), ISBN 978-0824811723
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy (1990), ISBN 978-0374527358
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior (1976), ISBN 978-0679721888
Trenka, Jane Jeong. The Language of Blood (2005), ISBN 978-1555974268
* Additional readings will be available through library course reserves.

What all humans have in common is actually what distinguishes them. How we define ourselves is ultimately not up to us because the thing we use for our self-definition – “identity” – is beyond our control. Exploring a variety of literary genres and forms, we will use the conception of identity as the tool to frame our comprehension and interpretation of the selected readings. We can see the concept of identity and identification change over the course of English and American literary history. What does identity/identification mean in literature that reflects the pre-capitalist era, imperial period, or late-capitalist times? Beginning with this fundamental question of identity, we are going to explore the multiplicity of identities of social subjects or objectified subjects which are socially, nationally, racially, and sexually constructed.

Novels include A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Fixer Chao by Han Ong, and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. We will also read a novella by Milton Murayama and see one film. Additional readings consist of articles by Stuart Hall, Lionel Trilling, Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stanley and Derald W. Sue, Toni Morrison, and Susan Najita.

In this course, two learning outcomes have been set up for students: first, the ability to develop a reasonable interpretation of a literary text and to support that interpretation with evidence; second, the ability to develop more sophisticated discussion and composition skills in the interest of being better able to construct and defend their own arguments or interpretations.

As a “W” or writing class, this course will devote effort to writing about literature. The writing assignments will be partly formed by GoPosts. Moreover, you will be required to accomplish two 1~2-page singled-spaced proposals and two 5~7-page major papers. Only the major papers will be graded; but the proposals will be taken into consideration for your final grades.

REQUIRED READINGS___________________________________________________________

A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
Fixer Chao (2001) by Han Ong
The Namesake (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri
Course packet available at the Ave Copy Center (4141 University Way)

This course lays down a basic framework of cultural studies by familiarizing students with foundational texts of cultural studies and the ways those texts have been applied to cultural artifacts across a variety of disciplines. Beginning with seminal texts from the eighteenth century, the course will trace a short chronology of cultural studies by examining its many different foci, including Marxist studies, gender studies, urban studies, entertainment studies, and others.

The second half of the course gives students the opportunity to practice the principles of cultural studies by analyzing fictional artifacts through the lens of cultural studies. English 208 A picks up the concept of the contemporary family as a theme that is exhibited in a multitude of instances in present-day culture, and thus is beneficially examined through the lens of cultural studies. In class discussion and essay writing, students will examine the current embattled definition of “family” in America under the rubrics proposed by cultural scholars, and make complex arguments about the meaning of that battle.

Students of English 207 A will be assessed for their ability to comprehend and retain information about cultural studies, including major theorists, vocabulary, and practice of the discipline. Students will also be expected to demonstrate proficiency in applying the theoretical habits of thought discussed in class in order to form clear, complex, and meaningful written arguments.

Course Texts
Course Reader
Sedaris, David. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ISBN 978-0316010795
St. Aubyn, Edward. Mother’s Milk ISBN 978-1890447427

This course will introduce students to the influential and interdisciplinary field of cultural studies by engaging some of the key critical writings on the concept of “culture” and situating these critical ideas in relation to a very specific topic: baseball. The course presumes no interest in baseball or sport per se, but instead aims to look at baseball as a cultural site, an important space where cultural issues like race and class are articulated and contested.

One purpose for cultural studies is to engage with spaces that are typically seen as not sufficiently intellectual or academic, not “cultivated” or “cultured” enough to warrant serious reflection or study. Cultural studies as a discipline in the US and the UK emerged in the 1950s and 60s as a method to consider the political and social implications of culture at large, and since that time has branched into different approaches that can all loosely be termed “cultural studies.” In this class we will be engaging with different models of cultural studies, and putting these models to use in studying cultural materials ranging from novella to theater to film and visual culture. The unifying theme across these different cultural materials is the relationship between baseball and race.

For this course, the method for demonstrating understanding and engagement with the materials will be through formal and informal writing assignments. In both the formal and informal assignments, writing serves as a place to explore meanings, connections, and ideas. As such, all of the formal course writing will involve feedback and revision, and all of the informal writing will help both discussion and development of the formal writing assignments. There will also be a small group presentation required.

4. Book List:

Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall
August Wilson, Fences

Additional, shorter texts to be selected from Matthew Arnold, CLR James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Adrian Burgos, Amy Bass, Alan Klein, Ken Burns, Toby Miller, Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarría, Ian McDonald, and Ben Carrington. These texts will be made available on e-reserve.

This "survey"-style course offers an introduction to Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian literature. The course will focus upon the emergence of modern conceptions of the imagination, of human rights, of reason, of religion, and of the self more generally. We will read a combination of poetry, fiction (short stories and novels) and nonfiction prose. Please expect a midterm and a final exam, plus at least one short paper.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire famously wrote that “modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” We are, over a hundred years later, still living in “modernity,” but how does our understanding of modernity in the twenty-first century differ from its meaning in the nineteenth? Or does it? And how can literature helps us understand the experience of living in these different “modernities”? This course is designed as an introduction to modern and postmodern literature of the twentieth-century, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments since 1900. The century that separates us from Baudelaire was a time of significant and rapid change, a century of political, cultural, technological, and social upheaval and revolution. The focus of our class will be the vast and at times bewildering array of artistic responses to the conditions of modernity, of living in “modern times.” We will be considering both the conditions of modernity—such as consumption, alienation, fragmentation, etc.—as well as the different kinds of artistic responses to these conditions—stream of consciousness narration, pastiche, metafictions, etc.—as a way understanding the idea of modernity in and through twentieth century literature. Instead of moving chronologically through our texts, we will be reading pairings of modernist and postmodernist authors in order to get a better sense of the variety of responses to modernity throughout the century. This will be a challenging course, with difficult and complex texts as well as an intense reading pace. We will also be reading and engaging with some controversial topics. Our authors will likely include T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, Don DeLillo, Djuna Barnes, Ishmael Reed, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, and David Lynch. Short stories, poetry, and secondary material will be available through a course pack.
>
> Required Texts:
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway ISBN: 978-0156628709 (Mariner Books)
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying ISBN: 978-0393931389 (Norton)
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land ISBN: 978-0393974997 (Norton)
Pynchon, Thomas. Crying of Lot 49 ISBN: 49 978-0060913076 (Harper Perennial)
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo ISBN: 978-0684824772 (Scribner)
DeLillo, Don. White Noise ISBN: 978-0143105985 (Penguin Classic)
Course Pack (available at the University Bookstore)


>

This course will introduce you to literary modernism and give you the opportunity to read some of its most famous texts, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waste Land. The class will consider the history of modernist writing and its relationship to the major social, technological, and cultural changes of the early twentieth century. One particular emphasis of the class will be on the role of art and the artist in modern life; another will be on how the content and structure of many modernist texts reveal anxiety over emerging new attitudes towards sexuality and gender roles. In addition, the class will read two novels, published in the later decades of the twentieth century, and consider what critics mean when they refer to postmodernism.
The reading list for this course includes difficult poems, novels and short stories that are well known for their complexity, daring and innovation. You may find that you will need to read some of them more than once in order to grasp their multi-layered structures of meaning.

Texts: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Katherine Mansfield, Stories; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Graham Swift, Waterland; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

How did the son of a provincial glove-maker write a series of plays that have come to be esteemed the supreme achievement of Western Literature? What accounts for their enduring popularity on stage, screen, and in the classroom? In pursuit of the answers we will throw ourselves into some of Shakespeare’s most famous writings. We will study 2 Comedies, 2 Tragedies, 2 History Plays, (this may include Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and Richard III) and a handful of Sonnets. Beyond familiarizing students with the basic plotline of the dramas, the course will offer strategies for understanding and appreciating Shakespeare’s English. Class discussion will center on in-depth analysis of key passages. Lectures and supplementary readings will help situate the plays in the context of the cultural, political and religious turmoil engulfing Early Modern England. Finally, we will also view clips of several film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays to better size up the shadow his legacy casts on our culture today. In order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to complete ten to fifteen pages of out of class writing, with revision.

From John Milton’s rendering of Satan in his epic poem, Paradise Lost to such characters as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, this course will delve into the cultural fascination with the dark side of the soul. Surveying a range of literature that centers on the aesthetics of evil, we will pose the question ‘why is it that villains tend to appear with more artistic force than the so-called good guys’? While we explore this idea through a variety of representations of evil, we will also question the ethical foundation on which the literature rests. That is, what moral or ethical instruction is to be had by reading these works of literature? Other concepts relevant and fundamental to our discussions will be the possibility of a truly autonomous subject, the notion of absolute freedom, Hell as a place and a psychological state, and the significance of works that feature characters attempting to move beyond religious notions of good and evil. The selection of literature that will address these issues will include, but is not limited to, the following: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. (Secondary sources might include excerpts from Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek.)
This class offers a "W" credit. This means that course participants will be expected to produce a total of 10-15 pages of formal, academic writing which has gone through a cycle of instructor feedback and revision. We will cover some formal academic writing technique in this class, but please keep in mind that this is not fundamentally a writing course. Though prior composition credits are not prerequisite, such experience will be to your distinct advantage.

Required Texts:
The Monk, Matthew Lewis (ISBN-10: 1551112272 / ISBN-13: 978-1551112275)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (ISBN-10: 0393964582 ISBN-13: 978-0393964585)
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (ISBN-10: 0393956237ISBN-13: 978-0393956238)
The Trial, Franz Kafka (ISBN-10: 0199238294 ISBN-13: 978-0199238293)
*Additional readings will be made available via course packet

Doppelgangers have haunted, entertained, and educated readers in texts dating as far back as Plato’s Republic. A psycho-sexual malady, supernatural visitation, harbinger of sin, personification of fear, alter ego, or reflection of an alternate world, the doppelganger has remained a popular motif in world literature. In ENGL 242 we will consider novels, short stories, plays, film, and philosophy dating from 380 BC to the 21st century from Mexico, Germany, Greece, Russia, Italy, England, Japan, America, and Argentina which take up the doppelganger motif in several contexts, including: colonialism, race, sexuality, and gender.

Close reading practices, argumentation skills, exploratory discussion, and academic-level composition will aide students in their development as interesting writers, critical thinkers, and epicureans who glut themselves on the multifarious pleasures of literature. “Doppelgangers in Fiction” is a general literature course for all majors that satisfies the writing requirement (W) at the University of Washington. To pass the course, students must compose 10-15 pages of revised writing.

Book list:

• Calvino, Italo. The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Harvest, 1962. Print. [ISBN-10: 0156659751; ISBN-13: 978-0156659758]

• Fuentes, Carlos. Aura. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986. Print. [ISBN-10: 0374511713/ISBN-13: 978-0374511715]

• Larsen, Nella. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories. Ed. Charles Larsen. New York: Anchor, 2001. Print. [ISBN-10: 0385721005; ISBN-13: 978-0385721004]

• Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1970. Print. [ISBN 0-452-27305-6]

• Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. [ISBN-10: 0199536090; ISBN-13: 978-0199536092]

• Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Katherine Linehan. New York: Norton, 2003. Print. [ISBN-10: 0393974650; ISBN-13: 978-0393974652]

This class will focus on the representation of crime in literature. As some of the texts we’ll examine are fictionalized renditions of actual events, we’ll have ample opportunity to interrogate the meanings of “fact” and “fiction.” This means we will explore the social and political “facts” that imaginative “fictions” record, the “fictions” that enable the legal and scientific production of “facts,” and so on. Although examples of early detective fiction will number among our objects of study, we will trace depictions of crime and criminality across a number of fictional forms that exceed the generic boundaries of the whodonit, all the while honing our abilities to read the clues to meaning left upon the page.

While sometimes representations of crime in fiction serve as an occasion to meditate upon human psychology or the nature of good and evil, in this class we will read crime in literature -- and the relationship between crime and literature -- very differently. Not only will we explore the politics and the histories of culturally pervasive notions of crime, criminality, and the criminal, but we will also question how literature participates in producing these notions and calling them into question. Thus, our investigation will ultimately allow us to reflect less upon “the human condition” than upon our present political realities -- and the fictions that undergird them.

Please do consider if you’re up for a challenging class before enrolling. The reading load will heavy and difficult. Central texts will likely be: Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907); Kafka’s The Trial (1925); Wright’s Native Son (1940); and Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Course texts are subject to change. Bookstore editions are recommended, but alternative editions are acceptable. Short fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, will be included in the course pack along with additional supplementary readings. This course is a “W” credit, which means that students will produce 10-15 pages of graded, out of class writing. Writing assignments will likely be: two 2 page response papers; two 2-3 page argument papers; and one 4-5 page research paper.

Book List:
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent 9781551117843 / 1551117843
Franz Kafka, The Trial 0199238294 / 978-0199238293
Richard Wright, Native Son 0060929804 / 978-0060929800
Toni Morrison, Beloved 0307264882 / 978-0307264886
Coursepack

Consider this course an initiation into the great and ongoing conversation surrounding one of mankind’s oldest and most respected art forms. We propose to read poems formally: that is, grouped by style rather than by country or age; bodily: we'll pass them through our throats and hands, not merely beneath our eyes; and critically: as in “art critic” i.e. with scrutiny, and as in “critical condition” as though it matters. We’ll paint quickly and with a broad brush, touching the greatest writers in the Western poetic tradition, from figures both major and minor, some of whose work you'll no doubt have encountered, but most of which will be new.

Student Learning Goals

Attempting to understand this business of poetry, we'll consider the art and its creators from several angles: in addition to the work itself, we'll read letters, criticism, manifestoes, and reviews in order to understand not only what this work means, but what it has meant to diverse communities throughout a long and staid history. To readers in generations past, poetry was not only the queen of the arts, but the very aqua vitae. Our job will be to taste and to develop taste: “to divine” in the old sense: sourcing and mapping poetic springs. Over the course of this class, you will develop perspective, confidence, and measurable skill in understanding and in writing about poetry.

General Method of Instruction

This class leans heavily on discussion, both in small and large groups. Be prepared also for public readings and presentations; historic, interpretive and guest-led lectures; field trips to relevant sites, and online participation in class blog.

Recommended Preparation

Purchase the course texts as early as you can. Start skimming around, following your fancy, and making copious marks in the margins.

Class Assignments and Grading

What understanding we manage to form, what inroads to make, will be codified in written responses of the following type and manner. 1) a reading journal featuring informal weekly responses to the work, which will be revised at quarter's end into formal critical engagements. 2) a keepsake book, wherein we'll hand-copy the full text of certain poems as a way to see better the lineation and mechanics of the work. 3) four short essays, described in detail in the course syllabus, which must, by the term’s end, undergo significant revision, in keeping with the University’s (W) requirement.

Required Texts

??The Longman Anthology of Poetry ed. Averille Curdy
??Choose one full-length poetry book of the eight on reserve at UW Bookstore
??A Blank Journal

Critical interpretation of major plays which explore the stories of Don Juan and Faust. Discussion topics include: types of drama (tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, parody); dramatic conventions and effects; major themes, historical contexts, and intertextual connections. Texts: Aristotle, Poetics (Dover Thrift); Tirso De Molina, The Trickster of Seville (Course Pack); Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Signet Classic); Moliere, Don Juan, tr. By Richard Wilbur (Mariner Books); Goethe, Faust Part I, tr. By David Constantine (Penguin Classics); George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Penguin); John M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Dover Thrift). Students must read Marlowe’s Faust, the Introduction, and the sources printed in the Signet edition before the first meeting. Numerous quizzes and a final.

We will read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories written by American authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will be expected to keep up with reading assignments and take part in open discussions in class. Written work will consist entirely of a series of between five and ten in-class papers, written in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Texts: Crane, ed. FIFTY GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES; Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES; Mark Twain, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN; James Baldwin, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN; John Steinbeck, EAST OF EDEN; and Anne Tyler, A PATCHWORK PLANET.

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

This course offers an introduction to American literature. We will do so from the perspective of writers whose communities were actively excluded from American citizenship. The course begins with an introduction to early ideas of what it means to be American through founding documents such as The Declaration of Independence. From there we will survey literature and other cultural artifacts throughout American history to determine how culture has shaped, responded to and challenged dominant concepts of who is American and what it means to be American. The readings in this course are meant to challenge a cohesive concept of American literary culture. Students will be asked to think about the ways that culture has been a means to engage in political debates; and we will do so by paying close attention to the specific historical context within which each piece of literature was written.



Primary texts will include a selection of the following: Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple, 1791. Harper, Francis. Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted, 1892. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle, 1906. Bulosan, Carlos. America is in the Heart, 1946. Bulter, Octavia. Kindred, 1979.

Book list with ISBN
Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple, 0195042387
Harper, Francis. Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted, 0807065196
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle, 0743487621
Bulosan, Carlos. America is in the Heart, 029595289X
Bulter, Octavia. Kindred, 0807083054

This course will examine the historical currents that necessitated the emergence of Asian American literature, in conjunction with a consideration of the difficulties and possibilities inherent to defining an “Asian Pacific American” literary sensibility. Asian American populations have been deeply impacted by restrictive immigration legislation and American foreign policy, putting its peoples in a unique position for defining Americanness. How do artists with an Asian ancestry challenge a country that ostensibly celebrates diversity yet looks with suspicion on the foreign? The course material is organized thematically, and not regionally. In other words, texts have not been chosen based on the particular ethnic affiliation of the authors. Rather, each work has been selected based on its illumination and/or contestation of themes and images commonly used to define an Asian American experience, such as fraught parent-child relationships and the incompatibility between East and West. We will be reading short pieces by Carlos Bulosan and Jhumpi Lahiri, and books by Chang-Rae Lee, David Henry Hwang, and Annie Choi.

Happy Birthday or Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters [Paperback]
• Annie Choi\ Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061132225 0061132225
• ISBN-13: 978-0061132223 0061132223

Native Speaker
M. Butterfly

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.

There are clear camps when it comes to the English language: For some, it is "the most perfect all-purpose instrument," "the grandest triumph of the human intellect," "the lingua franca of the angels," and, for others, it is "a weapon of war," "a steamroller," "the language of the criminal who committed the crime." It's the engine of angels or the cudgel of demons. But of course, English is not simply one or the other of these things. Over time, it has been lots of different things to lots of different people. And the purpose of this course will be to explore those uses and users throughout the history of the English
language.

This course will look to primary texts from major periods in the
history of English to begin to answer questions such as:

* What is English? What does it look like? (Is there one English
or are there many Englishes?)
* Who uses it? (A handful of people or a horde? The vulgar among
them or the elevated? The invaded or the invaders?)
* Where is it used? (In England or elsewhere? In letters, law
courts, literature?)
* How is its use mediated? (Is it spoken or written? Is it
transmitted by pen, wire, web?)
* What does it mean to use it? (Is its use praised or disparaged?
Does the language carry or disseminate political or
philosophical attitudes or ideologies?)

The readings for the course will include contemporary histories of the
language but primary attention will be given to texts, recordings, and
films that constitute interesting uses of English: the /Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle/, /Beowulf /(and the 2007 film /Beowulf/), the /Ancrene
Wisse/, the Prologue to /The Canterbury Tales/, early dictionaries and
grammars, speeches by Elizabeth I, various acts of union passed by the
United Kingdom, eighteenth-century elocution manuals, /Pygmalion /(and
the 1950 film /Born Yesterday/), episodes of NBC's /Outsourced/, Zadie
Smith's 2008 lecture "Speaking in Tongues," and /Trainspotting /(the
book and the movie).

Coursework will include lectures, discussions, presentations, exams,
and short response essays. Course texts will be available in the
University Bookstore or in the coursepack. No prior knowledge of Old
English, Middle English, or linguistics is necessary.

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

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

English 281B is designed to help students develop essential writing skills such as research, analysis, and revision. Specifically, this class focuses on the concept of community and navigates the meanings of community belonging and tensions among communities. Students will have an opportunity to work individually and in groups to investigate a variety of communities. In addition, students will learn to use primary source research –interview, observations, surveys – as an approach to examine a particular community of their interest.

Recommended preparation
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, paragraph and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory writing course before enrolling in English 281.

4. Book List
course reserves

Prerequisites:

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

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

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

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

> In this course we will examine the workings and origins of poetry through the study of craft elements such as
> meter, line, stanza, form, image, syntax, etc., as well as the wider social themes indexed in contemporary English-language poetry. Through intensive close reading, written exercises, and formal writing > assignments, we will approach poetic texts not only as communicative and artistic acts, but as artifacts of culture and history best understood through the lens of the writer him/herself. We will learn to read as writers—to be attentive to sound, sense, and the workings
> of tone—and to write as readers; that is, with the understanding that writing is a social act, and that every poem is in some way a response to the overlapping “regional, ethnic, racial, social, and sexual” identities that comprise our twenty-first century selves.
>
> Course Pack (available for purchase from Professional Copy and
> Print, 4200 University Way N)

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

Inspiration can be strange, coming from any number of sources: our lives, our surroundings, our imaginations, other writers’ stories, and other forms of art. In this course, we’ll learn how to harvest inspiration and how to craft from that inspiration short stories. This harvesting will necessarily be paired with a close look at how the literary short story works. We’ll read and examine a range of published short fiction with an eye toward understanding essential concepts of narrative craft: character, voice, point of view, plot, imagery, theme, dialogue and more. Brief lectures on each topic, alongside in-class and at-home writing exercises aimed at particular techniques, will prepare us to write with intention. Using these techniques, you will write a short story of your own and, in a workshop setting, give and receive feedback on your short stories.

4. Book List:
Burroway, Janet and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 8th edition.
ISBN 978-0-205-75034-4

Experiencing literature from the inside. 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.

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 humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

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

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

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

“To the pain.” This challenging phrase is what makes the bad guy succumb, without a fight, in The Princess Bride, so powerful is his imagining of what it would be like to live in permanent agony. This quarter we will focus on how a small number of thinkers have related our fear of bodily hurt to understanding how “the real” is created, and who has access to shaping it. We will read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Stephen Greenblatt’s essay “The Touch of the Real,” and then examine a few responses to these widely cited works by those like Eric Hayot. The quarter will end with you writing an essay that develops your theoretical critique of these thinkers. Overall, this course is structured not just on reading for content, but on thinking about what theory is for and the various forms theoretical writing can take. The goal of this course is to make it less about these writers themselves, and more about thinking about ways to get you comfortable with explaining, debating, and connecting theoretical arguments, both in class conversation and in written work. Note: Scarry’s book has been widely taught, so used copies should be readily available.



The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [Paperback]
Elaine Scarry

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (April 23, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195049969
• ISBN-13: 978-0195049961

This course will focus on Marx and Freud, distinct (among other major thinkers of modernity) for the way their work enables and inaugurates a critical practice – Marxism and psychoanalysis, respectively – that has endured, adapted, mutated, and flourished over the ensuing century (and more). Readings and discussions will track a few of their most significant, critical insights into the organization of material and psychic life, paying particular attention to how they bear on the work of literary and cultural study. Our forays into Freud will take up such key psychoanalytic concepts as the unconscious, resistance, transference, the phallus, and the family romance. Our readings in Marx will explore core notions of materialism, ideology, mode of production, value, and the distinction between abstract and concrete equality. Along the way, we will also consider ways to conjoin Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches and the stakes in imagining this conjuncture.

Critical materials for the course will be drawn from Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalyis and The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as his essay on “Fetishism.” We will also read selections from Marx’s Capital and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his essay “On the Jewish Question,” and a short selection from Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology. We will think through some of the issues and methods of these critical approaches in relation to a handful of literary and cinematic texts, including (most probably) Nella Larsen’s Passing, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Citizen Kane. Written assignments for the course will includes two five pages essays, as well as frequent, shorter in-class and overnight assignments.

This course provides theoretical basics and practical training in the analysis of narrative form. Discussions will be based on six major nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Students will work with key critical concepts associated with the poetics of the novel (story and plot, authorship and modes of narration, reliable and unreliable narrators, framing and embedding, point of view, methods of representing consciousness, irony, defamiliarization, metafiction, intertextuality). Please note: English 302B is an introduction to advanced literary analysis, and the class is reading-intensive. The novels by Balzac, Eliot, and Flaubert (see below) must be read before the first meeting. Books: Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Signet Classic); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Signet Classic); George Eliot, Silas Marner (Oxford World’s Classics or Signet); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford World’s Classics); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin). There will be a substantial pack of critical essays. Numerous quizzes and a final.

This class tracks the institutionalization of what Michel Foucault has termed “biopolitics,” or the targeted regulation of populations, as a widespread technology in the eras of neoliberal capitalism ushered in by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It will illustrate that this process was particularly effective when operating through the trope of “home,” and focuses on cultural production around conceptions of "home" from the late 1970s into the twenty-first century. We will examine the ways in which “home” – as a geographical and ideological site – can be read as a key site where oppressed people have been marginalized since the demise of traditional imperialisms. The “texts” (literature and film) we shall examine are produced by diasporic peoples of color currently living in the US and UK whose work resists and reappropriates exclusive “home” sites. Specifically, we will examine the literature of Michelle Cliff, Jessica Hagedorn, and Jackie Kay, and the films of Hanif Kureishi. In doing so, we will seek to excavate the ways in which neoliberal biopolitics pervade notions of “home” at various sites: in the post-colonial education and schooling in 1980s Jamaica; in experiences of post-colonial, Pakistani diasporas residing in Thatcherite London; in U.S. consumerism, militarism, and hegemonic notions of beauty in the Philippines during the Marcos era; and in the ideological and physical violence deployed by state institutions and exploitative media in contemporary Britain. Together, these ostensibly disparate "texts" piece together a puzzle that elucidates the ways that biopolitical mandates promoted by US and UK neoliberalism shape exclusive home sites. Such mandates regulate populations through categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which subsequently assimilate social identities to acceptable formations of “home.”



Required "texts":

Cliff, Michelle. "Abeng."

Hagedorn, Jessica. "Dogeaters."

Kay, Jackie. "Trumpet."

Foucault, Michel. "History of Sexuality, Volume I."

Kureishi, Hanif. "My Beautiful Launderette" (film).

Kureishi, Hanif. "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" (film).

This course introduces students to several key works by Marx and his collaborator, Engels, and to the debates that have grown up around them. At the center of the course is the question of how a body of writings principally about political economy, history, and philosophy got taken up by literary scholars, and how a distinct tradition of interpreting literary culture from a Marxist perspective, using Marxist tools, has developed over time. By contrast to other models of literary criticism which often seek to find in literary texts transcendent messages and universal meanings, Marxist materialism has sought to situate literary and cultural texts within their historical contexts of production and reception; to understand the power dynamics, including dynamics informed by gender, race, and class conflict, that shape textual meaning; and, to understand how such conflicts impact the literary work’s political message, genre, style and form.

Our study of Marxist theory will involve us in close, intensive reading of dense philosophical arguments among Marxist thinkers. We will also seek to understand how a materialist method indebted to Marxism has emerged as dominant within contemporary literary scholarship, and thus how diverse literary critical practices (often given such labels as “critical theory,” “feminist theory,” “critical race theory,” and “postcolonial studies”) are in fact part of a Marxist analytical tradition. Over the course of the quarter we will also read several widely acclaimed literary works. We will consider how our understanding of each might be shaped by the Marxist frameworks the course explores, and how literary texts in turn, can be used to reveal the (in)adequacy of Marxist methodologies.

Catalog Description: Various modern authors, from Wordsworth to the present, in relation to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, who have helped create the context and the content of modern literature. Recommended: ENGL 230 or one 300-level course in 19th or 20th century literature.

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

The course will offer a broad overview of the political, philosophical and literary history of the Romantic period (1789-1850), focusing on the works of the second generation of Romantic writers. We will begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics and of radical developments during this period in religion (the opposition to Christianity), philosophy (the revolt against empiricism), aesthetics (the prevailing interest in the sublime and the emergence of the aesthetics of the picturesque), art ( the change from the tradition of portrait paintings or paintings on historical subjects to landscape paintings in which the main subject is represented by nature as the human figure diminishes is size and significance)
and gardening (the change from the formal garden to a landscape that more nearly resembles the uncultivated look of the wilderness, according to standards set forth by picturesque aesthetics). After four weeks on these introductory topics, we will then turn to an in-depth study of the work of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and George Gordon Byron, focusing on their different representations of transcendence, the sublime, narcissism, transgression and the Promethean hero.

BOOKS: John Keats. Selected Poems and Letters (Riverside)
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Poetry and Prose (Norton)
George Gordon Byron. Poetical Works (Norton)
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein (St. Martin’s)

This course explores modernism and its social life, one defined by the city, class consciousness, and the shifting relationship between art and mass culture. Even as we examine the glittery surface of parties and fashion, we will also consider underlying tensions between social classes. Related topics may include urban life and the city as a space for social interaction, leisure and labor, mass production and consumption, individuals and crowds, and gender. In addition to a course pack with poetry and short stories, we will read novels by Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Evelyn Waugh. Time permitting, we will also discuss films such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things (2003). In addition to a demanding reading schedule, English 336 requires active participation in discussions and groupwork as well as exams, essays, and presentations.

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

This class in fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it.

Ambrose Bierce will be one of the “unpadded” writers whose fiction we will read first. Bierce’s stories are particularly fascinating, especially framed within the contexts of Flannery O’Connor’s and John Gardner’s assumptions about fiction. Over the course quarter, we will read stories as a means of investigating what subjects Ambrose Bierce and others cared about and thought they might lose or have lost, and we'll analyze how they crafted "unpadded" narratives with themes and styles that shocked the reading publics--both then and now.

All of the stories we'll read are modern and contemporary, stylistically conventional or experimental. We'll talk about why.

My primary goals of the course include:

*increasing your reading enjoyment of the short story sophisticating your reading practices

*exposing you to a variety of fictional authors, genres, styles, and literary movements

*enhancing your critical abilities, both orally and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate responses to stories

*convincing you that the critical reading of fiction can help immensely in the practical reading and plotting of life

Course print texts include Ann Charters' _The Story and Its Writer_ as well as one or two stories online or otherwise distributed to you.

It was with a difficult awe that Americans witnessed the capabilities of human ingenuity and technological development after World War I—difficult because while it facilitated labor, powered cities, and moved people and goods great distances with ease, it also demonstrated humanity’s power to kill in unprecedented numbers (which, of course, would only later be surpassed by the bomb). All this contributed to a shift in American habitation toward burgeoning cities, leaving the rural
scene nonplussed. These rapid changes led photographer Paul Strand to declare that mechanistic science had become the new God. Perceiving that the scientist had thus supplanted the artist as society’s favored child, Strand wrote in 1922 that the scientist “has made possible the present critical condition of Western Civilization, faced as it is with the alternatives of being quickly ground to pieces under the heel of the new God or with the tremendous task of controlling the heel.” Literary
responses to this critical condition ranged considerably, as the unflinching newness—confounded not least by the Great Depression—dizzied the American intellect. Out of the vortex emerged some of the more persistent and challenging literary innovations of twentieth century America.

In this course, we will approach the literature of the period by attending to writers’ constructions of human habitations, attending to representions—mainly textual and photographic—of the shifting modes of living and their affects on American consciousness and (conflicting) senses of identity.

Expect readings by Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Carl
Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Edna St.
Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, as well as
photographic works by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans,
Dorothea Lange, and others (list subject to revision). Work for the
course will consist of several short commentaries, a midterm exam, a
photographic project/presentation, and a final essay.

Texts:

/Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. D/. ISBN: 0393927423

Hemingway, /In Our Time/. ISBN: 0684822768

Agee and Evans, /Let Us Now Praise Famous Men/. ISBN: 0618127496

Lewis, /Main Street/Babbitt/. (Lib. Of America edition.) ISBN: 0940450615

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. Different kinds of transnational travel produce different kinds of migrant genres: immigrant literature (voluntary displacement), exile literature (forced displacement), and diaspora literature. 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; Canongate)
Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman (1997; Grove)
Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1992; Penguin)
Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991; Penguin)
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925; New Directions)
a small online course reader with short fiction and criticism

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

We will interpret a variety of texts (literary, cinematic, commercial, etc.) that address the water crisis with a view to understanding how water’s cultural meaning has changed as we have become more conscious of risks in supply (posed by pollution and natural/man-made scarcity) and as access to it is increasingly mediated (as a result of its privatization, commodification, etc.). While no ten-week course could pretend to give a comprehensive and global view of problem as complex as our relation to water, we will study novels, essays, films and other cultural documents from Western Europe, Africa, the Maghreb, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and North and Latin America with a view to understanding the differential distribution of the water crisis and the variety of aesthetic responses to it.

How to analyze speech into phones and phonemes, words into morphemes, and sentences into parts of speech and constructions. How to represent word and sentence meanings. Nature and extent of variation in language; function of a standard and definitions of correctness. Uses of a corpus.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 370

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

Intermediate prose. In this course, students will read dozens of exemplary and very brief essays and stories; students will then write several of their own brief essays and stories, based on the models.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Intermediate prose. In this course, students will read dozens of exemplary and very brief essays and stories; students will then write several of their own brief essays and stories, based on the models.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

This seminar will critically survey a number of contemporary genres and literary and visual forms, focusing on the representation of violence. We will concede that violence is of course the limit of representation. Indeed, this might be one definition of violence. However, we will also pursue thesis that varying forms and genres of representation reveal or mask better than others the violence they seek to capture. Because there is no universal "violence" that can be studied in its various representations, we will be examining specific formations of violence and certain hegemonic genres for their social representation. The violences to be discussed include: state violence, sexual violence, war, AIDS, and racial violence. Genres to be studied include: realism, visual documentary film, contemporary performance art, modernism, and sociology.

This course will use a single text, Mark Danielewski’s postmodern novel, House of Leaves, to consider the state of the book and of the various practices of reading at the present moment. House of Leaves is a novel that requires us to reconsider the material and social facts of the book—how it feels and looks, and how it functions as an object—along with the reading practices it both requires and complicates. How we have learned to read—the practices of reading books, websites, and others texts—and how reading has changed over time will require us to enter into the labyrinth of theory. We will spend time reading the novel and relevant essays about the history of the book and theoretical essays about the conceptual and practical issues connected to the practice(s) of reading. Requirements will include several short essays, a presentation, and a long final project.

“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the short story by Herman Melville, is routinely considered among the best short stories written in English. It has produced a virtual avalanche of critical and cultural responses, from scholarly articles to film versions and even a few sit-com episodes. It would be foolish to think we can cover all of that activity, but we can focus on a few things. In the first part of the course, we will work our way carefully through the many levels of play, allusion, and perplexity in Melville’s story by reading it very carefully, and asking about what is both explicit and embedded in the narrative, including primarily: Melville’s purported interest in the changing and related politics of slavery and wage labor in an industrializing economy; the limits of rationalism; the violence of language and writing. We will also read critical, literary essays on “Bartleby,” along with a couple of other Melville stories from the same period dealing with similar themes or questions. In the second part of the course, we will explore the ways the figure of Bartleby has been recycled in contemporary critical theory and popular culture. We will be concerned at this point with what theorists find the story has to say to us about power or authority, especially with regard to the law and writing, and the modern conditions for the legibility of the resistant/desiring/abject body. Students will be expected to prepare and present written reading responses to jumpstart our discussions; to write in-class from time to time; to participate in occasional in-class group work; to turn in an early abstract/description of a final long paper topic, along with an annotated bibliography; and, finally, to complete a final written project (15-20 pages) for the course.

There are no books at the UW bookstore for this course. All course readings are available in a course packet.

Given that much contemporary immigration from the Caribbean and West Africa was in part a product of the Civil Rights Movement, an increasing amount of “African-American” literature is actually being produced by writers whose relationship to America is as complex as their relationship to this always strange commodity and unstable category called “black.” This is not entirely unprecedented considering the presence and impact of West Indian literature and politics on early 20th Century New York City. But with new generations arriving since middle of the last century, and the decisive presence of continental Africans who’ve been arriving also as refugees, the political context and the aesthetic terms of this new writing requires an entirely new orientation. This new orientation is one that must engage however controversially the older histories of black writing and the political and theoretical expectations of what “black” writing is or could be for what is arguably an entirely new race of American people.

Paule Marshall: Brown Girl, Brownstones, Dover Publications, ISBN-10: 0486468321
Edwidge Danticat: The Dew Breaker, Vintage; ISBN-10: 1400034299
Jamaica Kincaid: Lucy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN-10: 0374527350
Chris Abani: The Virgin of Flames, penguin non-classics, ISBN-10: 014303877X
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: That Thing Around Your Neck, Anchor Books, ISBN-10:
0307455912
Dinaw Mengistu: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Riverhead Trade, ISBN-10:
1594482853
Dave Eggers: What is the What, Vintage Books, ISBN-10: 0307385906

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).

When we speak of “literature,” we bring together an incredibly miscellaneous range of possibilities, including sonnets written 4 centuries ago in England with experimental fiction written last week in Zimbabwe. Given this historical range and cultural breadth, how do we conceptualize the field as a discipline? Furthermore, how do we go about teaching this miscellany to our future students?

Beginning with the institutional history of English as a discipline, we will investigate the ways that “the field” has shifted over the decades in response—and sometimes defiance-- to various social and political forces. We will ask and try to answer the following queries: how is it we have come to understand and teach "English" the way we do? What are the similarities and
distinctions between English, literary studies, and language arts? What might pedagogy have to do with literature, and how do we craft a mindful teaching and learning practice, both for ourselves and our students? Political ideology,
social history, and personal identities all inform our pedagogy and curriculum-- how? This class seeks to be part theory driven, and part practicum: First we will read texts which focus on the practice and experience of teaching different kinds of literature in order to build a common knowledge base and gain some book smarts. Then we’ll practice these ideas and methods in
mock classrooms with each other.

Students will have the option of adding a service-learning component which will bring them into local K-12 classrooms to practice work as tutors, mentors, and writing coaches.

This course provides an introduction to the study of law from linguistic and rhetorical perspectives, with a focus on writing and legal documents. We’ll explore legal language in civil and criminal contexts, read from trial transcripts, hear from an expert in legal writing, and, I hope, visit a court. We’ll also read about the lawyer’s role and becoming a lawyer. Assignments will include analyses of legal documents, presentation of legal cases, and a final paper analyzing an important legal decision from a linguistic or rhetorical perspective.

Textbooks:
Moliterno and Lederer, Law, Law Study, and the Lawyer’s Role, 3rd ed.
Solan and Tiersma, Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice
Tiersma, Parchment, Paper, Pixels: Law and the Technologies of Communication
Course packet

English 481A/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 481 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.


Required texts: Coursepack; Diana Hacker A Pocket Style Manual, 5th edition (or another style and citation manual)

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Students will learn the craft of screenwriting by analyzing screenplays, films, film treatments and working with related formats such as radio drama and web drama. The following writing projects will be completed during the class: original radio play, short film script adapted from a news story, original screenplay and video of a monologue, and finally, an adaptation of a published short story into a screenplay for a short film.

Catalog Description: Students read screenwriting manuals and screenplays, analyze exemplary films, and write synopses, treatments, and first acts of their own screenplays.

Catalog Description: Students read screenwriting manuals and screenplays, analyze exemplary films, and write synopses, treatments, and first acts of their own screenplays.

Catalog Description: Students read screenwriting manuals and screenplays, analyze exemplary films, and write synopses, treatments, and first acts of their own screenplays.

Henry Fielding joked about humanity being divided into High People and Low People. In this seminar we will be diving down among the Low People to look at representations of social bottom-dwellers, such as servants, criminals, prostitutes, laborers, and other nobodies, in a selection of material both literary and non-literary: Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, pictures by Hogarth, the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (criminal trial proceedings), and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. We will concentrate first on the English eighteenth century, where the concept and representation of the “low” assumes such vivid modern form, but push forward into later times as well, with readings in E.P. Thompson’s great history The Making of the English Working Class, the nineteenth-century novel, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and contemporary examples such as Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards. We will take up some of the theoretical ramifications of the subject, like the concept of class and the question of why and how the low or socially non-elite become attractive material for artistic or documentary representation. Don’t dress up.

This course will feature the move from medieval, pre-Gutenbergian manuscript (hand-written) texts to their presentation in our contemporary, post-Gutenbergian technologies (facsimiles and digital editions). Our attention will focus on a few medieval English works and their material survivals; on the editorial principles affecting scholarly decisions about what form an individual text takes, or should take; and the challenges and opportunities offered by modern technologies of textual representation.