“Qui regarde au fond de Paris a le vertige.”—Victor Hugo
[He who looks into the heart of Paris has vertigo.]

. . . and somehow that vertigo is intoxicating and inspiring. With it comes the promise of history and culture, an abiding cosmopolitanism, a feeling of possibility. Or isn’t it pretty to think so? There is also an inescapability of loss and the inevitability of wasting decay.

Paris has inspired the work of more than two centuries of American artists and intellectuals. From Thomas Jefferson to James Baldwin these figures have chronicled the attraction and conflict between European and American social and cultural values.

This class will examine the relationship between a group of expatriate American writers and the city that inspired them. We will pay particular attention to what Gertrude Stein labeled “the lost generation,’ reading works by Hemingway, James, Fitzgerald, Pound, and others as we attempt to understand how the shared experience of living in Paris, with its feeling of liberation and limitation, shaped some of the most important American literature of the early twentieth century.

In addition to focusing on analytic and reading practices, as a “W” course, Americans in Paris will also help students develop and improve their writing. Students will be asked to submit weekly written responses to readings as well as two 5-6 page papers during the quarter. As a class we will also be producing a literary “magazine,” which will include book reviews, brief biographies, textual analysis, and more. The research, writing, and editing requirements for this project will be shared among group members.

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

This course is a survey of literature on social unrest and upheaval in a variety of forms. We will examine what is broadly understood as protest literature, ranging from the political essay to the utopic/dystopic text. As a class, we will consider feminism, racial politics, heterosexism, and psychic violence in texts that span from the late nineteenth century until the current moment. Further, we will trace formal innovations in the novel, short story, and essay against the background of racism, class conflict, debates around psychiatry and mental health, and shifts in the meaning of gender and sexuality. The course focuses in particular on the relationship between race, gender, and violence, and on questions of psychic trauma, modes of resistance, and personal history: as such, we will read these texts as responses to a set of questions that deal with the individual’s relationship to protest, social movements, and social justice. Our tentative list of texts includes: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time; selections from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider; and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men.

This class will focus on the practice of close reading, and the subsequent translation of our analytical success into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read. Daily attendance, active participation, and a clear engagement with class materials are vital for your success in this course.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two, 5-7 page term papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

This course is a survey of modern and contemporary literatures which take globalized forms of English as both a theme and medium. The last thirty years have witnessed a significant emergence of English language writing from outside its metropolitan strongholds in the United States and United Kingdom. A number of critical debates have arisen along with this proliferation of ‘New Englishes,’ each offering fruitful and compelling opportunities for interrogating the problems and possibilities posed by these fresh, dynamic, and (quite often) culturally and politically subversive voices. As a class, we will consider the politics of language, place, nation, and class from within the prism of a number of different forms, including novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, and film. We will focus both on the globalization of the language as kind of cultural capital connected to the international printing industry, as well as locating the texts we read in their regional and national contexts. We will ask what kind of new ways of knowing and seeing these texts offer us, and what they can tell us about our place in a world at once decentralized and different, but also locked into larger patterns of sameness offered by global capital. The texts and authors we will read may include, but are not limited to the following:
Novels - Sozaboy, by Ken Saro-Wiwa; The African Origins of UFOs, by Anthony Joseph, The Stone Virgins, by Yvonne Vera, Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh, The Temple-Goers, by Aatish Taseer.
We will likely read poetry by Les Murray, Claude McKay, Tom Leonard, Mongone Serote, Lesogo Rampolokeng, Grace Nichols, Liz Lochhead and others.
We will also read Brian Friel’s play Translations and watch either Neil Blomkamp’s film District 9 or Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi.

This class will focus on the practice of close reading, and the subsequent translation of our analytical success into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read. Daily attendance, active participation, and a clear engagement with class materials are vital for your success in this course.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two, 5-7 page term papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire covered an enormous part of the globe; at its peak, the British Empire governed a quarter of the world’s population. This course introduces students to some of the literatures that emerged from colonial encounters between the British and the peoples they colonized. Colonialism was a crucible for ideas about race and gender, and the turn of the twentieth century witnessed dramatic transformations in these ideas. Students will analyze how gender and race are represented in the following readings: Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, Kipling’s Kim, Orwell’s Burmese Days, Tagore’s The Home and the World, and Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream. Additional readings (for context) may include selected poems, bits from travel writing and memoirs, official imperial memos, and anti-colonial speeches.

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.

Cultural Studies is a method of looking at and analyzing cultural phenomenon. It is a “way of reading” generated from diverse critical practices and academic disciplines: this method draws from literary theory, media studies, sociology, political economy, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and art history/criticism. In this class, we will take a Cultural Studies perspective and ask: what is this thing we call “culture”? How do we read different forms of culture and why? What are different critical practices and methodologies for unpacking cultural production such as commercials, films, or novels? How do we understand and analyze the intersections of cultural and social formations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality? In order to become Cultural Studies scholars, we will read and engage with a range of important cultural theorists such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, among others.

After gaining a Cultural Studies vocabulary and filling our theoretical toolboxes, we will address the nature of *consumption* in a culture of neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism, and globalization. We will ask: in our era, how is culture consumable and consumed (through food, tourism, education, Hollywood, nostalgia, etc)? How does globalized capitalism produce, limit, or delineate the possibilities of consumption? How are the arguments, contentions, and negotiations over identity (especially in terms of multiculturalism) part of a globalized consumer culture? How is consumption structured by race, gender, and class and vice versa? We will look at different artifacts that speak to our questions, such as television shows (ex: Bones, Modern Family, Glee), advertisements (ex: Super Bowl commercials), urban landscapes (ex: the International District), and novels (ex: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth).

This class runs on the interactions between you and your peers. In order to succeed in this class, you should be prepared to participate in both large group discussions and small group work. The writing component of this class includes several short assignments throughout the quarter, and a final research project (where you put your Cultural Studies scholarship to work).

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.

This course focuses on British poetry, drama, and fiction from 1700 – 1900. We will closely examine representative texts of the period that take up the topics of disguise, costume, masquerade, and mistaken identity. Our reading will begin with the following questions: How do eighteenth and nineteenth-century authors use costumes, disguises, or assumptions about identity to comment on social issues pertaining to gender or class? What are the standards through which the characters of each text are defined? Can characters achieve self-definition, or are they limited by their class, gender, or family? Can disguises or costuming aid characters in the project of redefinition?

Course texts will include: William Congreve’s “Way of the World,” Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Lord Byron’s “Beppo,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest,” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Course requirements will include extensive participation, presentation duties, small response papers, and a midterm and final exam.

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.

Students in the course work toward several goals:

*Analyzing the language, structure and themes of fictional texts,
*Explaining the relationship between selected 20th-century literary texts and the political, social, historical and cultural contexts of their production,
*Defining (and recognizing the limits of defining) literary modernism and postmodernism, and
*Developing as critical thinkers who can formulate substantive arguments and explore those arguments with evidence.

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

Winter 2010 course web site: http://faculty.washington.edu/kgb/213/. Please note that some texts and assignments will be altered for 2012.

William Shakespeare's corpus stands as a high-water-mark in the history of English language drama. While we don't know when he was born, exactly, he was baptized the 26th of April, 1564 and died 23 April, 1616. He married Anne Hathaway at the age of 18. When he was 21, in 1585, Shakespeare began his career as an actor, writer, and playwright. While there is some debate (and an upcoming film) as to whether Shakespeare was responsible for composing all of the works attributed to him, we will try to focus mainly on some of the texts and performances, taking all controversy in stride.

Few figures have been so frequently the subject of the Bard's attention as the fool. Showing up in a large quantity of his plays, fools often complicate the usually to complicate, subvert, or invert the play's established social norms.

In this class we will focus on Shakespeare's plays where the fool (or Jester or Clown) figures significantly into the drama, and that shows himself to be more than just…a fool. We will concentrate on reading the texts firstly, as texts, then we will attempt to situate our own readings within a contextual and critical framework. Some theorists we will likely read are C. L. Barber, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Northrop Frye. There will be a minimum of theory in this course—the majority of the interpreting will be done with the plays directly.

We will, in addition to reading several of Shakespeare's plays, watch a few of them, since our critical framework for understanding the plays should not exclude but embrace the performative aspects of plays.

Plays we will read: As You Like It or What You Will, King Lear, The Tempest, 1 Henry IV, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet.

The reading load of this class will be rigorous, and the content difficult, but rewarding. Attentiveness to the literature and criticism is a requirement. Students will be required to (TBA) write weekly Go-Postings, commenting on critical positions raised in the texts or in class, or do weekly reading questions. In addition, each student (with a group of 3 others) will give one 15 minute presentation of a selected text and then lead classroom discussion that day. Since this 200 level literature course is also a W-course, students are required to write two 5-7 page essays over the course of the quarter. Paper topics must be submitted in writing to me two weeks before the paper is due.

For more information on W-course requirements, see the University of Washington description:

In this course we’ll be reading works of fiction (mostly 20th-century) that one way or another deal with the stakes and problems of narration, particulary first-person narration. We’ll look at ways in which narrators wrestle with the difficulties of reconstructing an event in language, the ways this stuggle affects the text, and the problem’s broader implications. Classwork will be mostly dedicated to close reading. Texts will include Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky), The Trial (Kafka), Molloy (Beckett), Death and the Dervish (Selimovi?), Cosmos (Gombrowicz), and possibly other selections compiled in a course reader.

The course satisfies the university's W requirement. Students will write one final, 10-12 page paper, which they will have an opportunity to revise in consultation with the instructor

students to five major works of fiction and investigates the power of narrative. 242 is a survey course so we will sample works from various historical periods and genres: works from the 1700s to the late 20th century, from romance to the postmodern. Simultaneously, we will consider the evolution of narrative, as well as narrative’s power extending beyond the text’s borders. As Paul Cobley tells us, “even the most ‘simple’ of stories is embedded in a network of relations” (2). Students will acquire tools for analyzing how narrative constructs and perhaps disrupts experience, human or otherwise.

Students should be prepared to write one long paper divided into two parts (a 5 page paper revised and extended to 10-12 pages), comparing and contrasting two different narrative strategies. Bi-weekly analyses of the novels are required as is daily participation in class discussion. While there may be an occasional lecture, class discussion will serve as our primary mode of engagement.

Course Materials:

Defoe, Daniel, and Evan R. Davis. Robinson Crusoe. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010. Print. ISBN-13: 978-1551119359
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Kristin F. Samuelian. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. Print. ISBN-13: 978-1551113210
Eliot, George, and Rosemary Ashton. Middlemarch. London: Penguin, 2003. Print. ISBN-13: 978-0141439549
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harvest, 1990. Print. ISBN-10: 0156628708
Amis, Martin. Time's Arrow, Or, the Nature of the Offense. New York: Vintage International, 1992. Print. ISBN-13: 978-0679735724

Cobley, Paul. Narrative. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. ISBN-13: 978-0415212632

The literary critic Roland Barthes famously divided novels of “pleasure”—formulaic, enjoyable texts that follow conventions—from novels of “bliss”—novels that shake-up our way of seeing the world, and that cause intense joy rather than sedate pleasure. Often texts of bliss are reserved for the classroom, while texts of pleasure are what we turn to for our “guilty pleasure.”

This class will question these assumptions about texts of pleasure and bliss through an investigation of genre fiction novels, which are produced within the bounds of particular niche markets, such as Science Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, Coming of Age, Action-Adventure, Horror, and Mystery. We will consider how genre conventions are formed historically, socially and politically, and how conventional forms, like Fantasy, can smuggle along particular values and political positions. How can genre conventions be used to expose socially conventional ways of seeing race, gender, class and sexuality? What value-laden assumptions are inherent in particular genres, and how have such genres been appropriated over time to reflect social, economic or political changes?

To direct our inquiry, we will focus on authors from marginalized social groups who have appropriated genre conventions to make new critiques, create new worlds, and expand the genre for future writers and readers. We will read W.E.B. Du Bois’ Dark Princess and Otonno Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale to explore how these writers have used Romance and Coming of Age to expose deeply held assumptions about race, nation and masculinity. In a similar mode, we will read Octavia Butler’s Dawn to look at Science Fiction, Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea to look at Fantasy, and Rudolfo Anaya’s Zia Summer to look at Detective Fiction.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement and VLPA requirement. As such it will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, in the form of three short papers.

In this section of English 242, we will read fiction that allows us to interrogate how the valorization of productivity—the capacity for production in a given amount of time—emerges in modern U.S. culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, and the implications of this high value. The course will think critically about the centrality of “work ethic” to narratives of U.S. progress, looking at different sites of formal and informal labor and their workers: the factory, the farm, the firm, etc.

We’ll ask how fiction and narratives represent and also negotiate notions of productivity, especially in its dealings with one of the key terms in measuring productivity: time. The course will examine developmental time, the work day, reproductive cycles, among others, and how fiction intervenes in counterposing these temporal regimes.

Readings for this course will include Theodore Dreisder’s Sister Carrie, George Schuyler’s Black No More, Jaun Laya’s His Native Soil, and a reader of short fiction and secondary work.

Since this is a “W” course, reading tasks will be coupled with a good deal of writing, workshopping your
writing, and responding to classmates’ writing. Much of the course will be given to practicing close
reading techniques and constructing well argued, engaging literary analyses. Assignments will include
weekly online posts and responses, two short papers, and one long essay.

Poetry is often imagined as making timeless statements about universal human truths, as being ethereal, ineffable, and transcendent. Poetry, however, is always written, printed, sold, and read under specific circumstances, and this course assumes that these facts matter to our understanding of a poem—or even to our willingness to see a text as a poem. With this in mind, we won’t simply ask “What does this poem mean?” Instead, we’ll begin by asking “How is meaning created in this poem?” and then chart how our reading of a poem shifts depending on our ideas about authorship, awareness of the poem’s historical moment, encounter with a particular material version of the text, or expectations as readers.

More specifically, we’ll consider how knowledge of authors’ biographies might impact our analysis of their work, as well as how writers have tested the limits of authorship through collage, erasure, translation, or hoax. We’ll look at technologies (such as the printing press and the typewriter) that have influenced poetry, and the effects of titles, typography, spelling, spacing, punctuation, prefaces, endnotes, and images on interpretation. We’ll examine how poets have revised and republished poems during their lifetimes, in addition to how their work has been altered after their deaths. We’ll also explore ways that readers make meaning out of texts, especially texts that challenge conventional definitions of “poetry.”

Texts:
We’ll start the quarter with Shakespearean sonnets and end with Anne Carson’s Nox (2010). Along the way, we’ll read poems by George Herbert, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, A. R. Ammons, Wang Wei, Jack Spicer, Araki Yasusada, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Kimiko Hahn, and Jen Bervin.
The required texts for this class are Nox (ISBN 0811218708) and an English 243 course pack.
Writing:

This course fulfills the university’s “W” requirement. As such, you’ll write three brief response papers, one of which you’ll expand into a longer paper (of 7-10 pages) that you will revise during the last week of the course. You will also write a book review of Nox and a final reflection on your learning.

This course examines the concept of American literary form by reading across a variety of texts. We begin the course with a reading of a slave narrative and end with an investigation of what has been called a Magical Realist novel. Along the way, we will examine the relationship between the historical contexts in which a text is written and the texts themselves. No doubt American literary form looks differently in the mid-nineteenth century than it does at the beginning of the twenty-first. Yet we will also consider the ways that earlier texts anticipate later formal strategies, and the ways that contemporary texts include traditional narrative techniques and styles.

In addition to a course reader, texts may include: Douglass, Frederick. *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave* ISBN: 9780674034013. Chopin, Kate. *The Awakening* ISBN: 9780393960570. Anderson, Sherwood. *Winesburg, Ohio* ISBN: 9780393967951. Wright, Richard. *Native Son* ISBN: 9780060837563. Diaz, Junot. *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao* ISBN: 9781594483295.

The ideal of the road in U.S. culture - from slaves escaping to the north, to “Go West, young man!”, to Kerouac’s mad desire to “burn, burn, burn” -- the road has long symbolized tantalizing possibilities for escape, freedom, and the running down of that elusive dream.

Or has it? What is this dream of the road, and how – mechanically – does it work? How have different forms of transportation emerged in national history, and to what effects? In this class, we will track transportation as a way to explore the construction of a national identity alongside the construction of transportation lines and thoroughfares. Our collection of texts is broad, and indeed roams quite liberally through US history, but our goal across these texts is to understand how literary representations of transportation in the U.S. contribute to questions of equality, expansionism, freedom, community, and national identity.

Alongside the literary texts, we will also “read” contemporary Seattle for the same questions. Students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in current debates on bikes, light rail and the Metro bus, and car and highway taxes. Students should be prepared to think critically about their own relationship to transportation and to put these experiences into conversation with the literature we read. Hence, the guiding question for the class is not only how does the history of US literature represent transportation issues, but also how are these same issues represented in contemporary debates? Our focus on Seattle’s current events will help us to ground some of our more theoretical literary conversations in the high-stakes debates of our own moment.

Texts (available at University Bookstore)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, ISBN 978-0-312-44203-3
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ISBN 978-0-312-44266-8
John Okada, No-No Boy, ISBN 978-0295955254
Cormac McCarthy, The Road, ISBN 978-0307387899

Course reader available at Ave Copy Center.

Contemporary resources will include newspapers The Stranger, The Seattle Times, The Daily, and lectures by local activists and transportation professionals. Students will also have the opportunity to attend local lectures, meetings, and town halls, in order to actively join the conversation.

This course will examine the historical currents that necessitated the emergence of an Asian Pacific American literary sensibility, in conjunction with a consideration of the difficulties and possibilities inherent to in this categorization. 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? We will be reading the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, the essays of Carlos Bulosan, the play M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, watching Margaret Cho’s I’m the One that I Want, and novels by Annie Choi and Chang-rae Lee.

English 281 is designed on the philosophy that composition is pivotal to academic and professional success. By learning the power of genre and focusing on the role of disciplinarity, students of 281 expand on previous writing experience in the university by practicing advanced strategies for composition success.

As a composition course, English 281 A has the following goals.

- to teach the function of genres and encourage genre sensitivity

- to establish awareness of writing strategies within relevant disciplines

- to instill recognition of the demands inherent in different writing situations

Additionally, English 281 A invites students to explore the parameters of a discipline that interests them and has relevance to their academic goals. Over the course of the quarter, students will gain the confidence that comes with constructing a disciplined argument from its most basic to its most polished elements. Through extensive journaling, discipline mapping, and multiple drafting, students will leave 281 with skills honed in argument, rhetoric, formatting, and genre recognition and reproduction. In addition, students will have the experience of crafting highly polished, expertly appointed arguments that align specifically with their disparate fields of study.

Texts and Requirements

o Course Packet, available at Ave Copy

o Journal

o Internet access

o Printing capabilities

Note about 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.

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

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

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

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

Catalog Description: 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: 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.

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

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

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

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

This course will focus on the Nobel laureate’s influential novel, placing it in multiple contexts: history, Morrison’s body of fiction (such as the trilogy of novels that *Beloved* is a part of), black feminist criticism, and African American literary and cultural studies more generally. We will examine how the text responds to and reshapes historical events, and consider the intellectual interventions it makes in taking up this history. We will consider how concerns that *Beloved* raises—the task of “remembering” the past and constructing cultural authority—are raised in other works by the author. Finally, we will ask how the award-winning novel, which is so often taught, written about, and included in literary curricula, bears an impact on what is meant by “American literature.”

This course will address the historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literature and literary study. The first section of the course, "What is Literature? Why National Literatures?," will consider what distinguishes literature from other forms of writing, and explore how our present understanding 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. 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, ideology critique, and deconstruction. 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 vantage on literature as a cultural practice, rather than cultural product.

Course materials will include short novels and novellas by Hannah Foster (The Coquette), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), and Ama Ata Aidoo (Our Sister Killjoy), We will also read a range of analytical work that address the themes and issues of the course, including Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice. Additional materials will be assembled in an electronic course packet.

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 is designed to provide English majors with an in depth experience of the practice of literary study. Clearly there are many ways to study literature and our understanding of the “best” or “most useful” practice(s) continues to be contested and to change over time. In this course we will focus on one of the more important critical practices that is dominant in the contemporary academy and that informs scholarship done by members of the profession and the UW department, today: Marxist materialism and related forms of cultural theory that often fall under labels such as “critical theory,” “feminist theory,” “critical race theory,” and “postcolonial theory.” By contrast to earlier models of literary criticism, which sought to find in literary texts transcendent messages and universal meanings, Marxist materialism has sought to situate literary and cultural texts within their historical context of production and reception; to understand the power dynamics, including those of gender, race, and class, that necessarily shape textual meaning; and to understand how social and historical conflict impacts literature’s message, genre, style and form. Our study of Marxist theory will involve us in close, intensive reading of dense philosophical arguments about economics (aka: political economy), ideology, and culture. Along the way we will read several key texts by Marx and his collaborator Engels. Among other things, this course examines how a literary critical framework has been developed by literary and cultural theorists out of a body of economic and social theory that was not necessary concerned with literature per se. Over the course of the quarter we will also read several literary texts. We will consider how our understanding of each is shaped by the critical practice the course explores, and how literary texts in turn, reveal the (in)adequacy of this critical practice and/or suggests new ways of thinking about literary production and interpretation. Books will be available through the bookstore and there will be an ample course reader.

This course will trace some central developments in literary criticism and theory over the course of the twentieth century. We will open by spending time exploring what, exactly, literary criticism is and does, not to mention the fuzzier “theory.” However nuanced the definitions we come up with, one of the primary concerns of criticism and theory—and so of this course—is the nature of the relationship between texts and worlds.

The course will move through the primary critical developments, likely (but not certain) to include formalism, New Criticism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, new historicism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and, as we approach the present, gender and queer theory, and, finally, ecocriticism. Our approach should reveal departures as well as points of contact between these traditions, as each has a different, but sometimes overlapping set of questions regarding what a thinker or a reader ought to pay attention to when reading a text or cultural object. We will explore the premise that how we pay attention, and the values and assumptions that inform that attention, have a lot to do with how we understand the world in which we live and the powers we have to change it.

Work for the course will consist primarily of heavy reading and discussion, as theoretical texts tend to be dense and some of the concepts difficult. Students will be responsible for routine responses to issues in the texts and discussions, one exam, one essay, and a presentation. Reading quizzes may punctuate the workload. Specific readings will announced as ready, taken from a big textbook (a large anthology) and a smaller volume (Critical Practice, by Catherine Belsey). Some supplementary readings will be made available online.

This course grapples with an ongoing critical conversation whose starting points are Marx and Nietzsche. Four questions will orient our reading of every work. First, and fundamentally, what is the question or question-set that the theorist proposes to answer and how does s/he set about doing that? This question and approach to it determine what is thinkable and so drive the argument. (A recurring question for these theorists is how has history been manifested: in the human sciences, literature, theory, and other practices; in “facts on the ground” which these discourses work to promote, modify or contest; and in the formation of human subjects and social relations. A related question is, what kind of critique is best suited to transforming the historical conditions in which we live.) Second, what is the writer’s argument, how persuasive is it and why? (In evaluating the argument consider not only the assembled evidence but also significant omissions.) Third, what are the argument’s stakes? For instance, what other critical practices or insights does it enable or inhibit? How might you put this argument and/or methodology to use in your own work, why and with what modifications? Four, what other discourses (theories, institutions, social practices, etc.) does this critique engage and on what terms? (While this final question provides a point of entry into all of the texts we will examine, I propose to pay particular attention to the ways in which contemporary theorists supplement, revise, and/or contest their predecessors—and for what reasons.) These theorists will include: Anderson, Balibar, Brown, Butler, Fergusson, Foucault, Harvey, and Hartman. The topics we’ll address include. These are not easy reads, and we will work through them slowly with a good bit of attention to what they might contribute to understanding and intervening in the world in which we live.

This course will introduce students to a range of Chaucer’s works, focusing particularly on the Troilus and Criseyde and selections from The Canterbury Tales. We will begin, however, with a couple of his shorter, earlier texts (Book of the Duchess and Parliament of Fowls) and will take up the Legend of Good Women after the Troilus.

The aims of the course will be to develop students' competence in the reading and understanding Chaucer’s Middle English so that they can appreciate the variety and liveliness of his poetry.
To help inform the latter, we will look at some of the sources he drew from (and altered) for his narratives; consider a variety of critical approaches to his works; and examine aspects of medieval culture which may illuminate his complex social and artistic sensibilities.

My classroom preference is for discussion, but in its absence (or in attempts to stimulate it) I will resort to (more or less informal) lecturing.Some previous reading of Chaucer and/or of other medieval texts would be helpful, as would some appreciation of the kinds of changes the English language has undergone in its history.

Requirements for the course will include – in addition to attendance and participation in class discussions – weekly response papers, some translation exercises and quizzes, a few longer (3-5, 5-8 pp.) critical papers, and a final exam.

Required Texts:

Geoffrey Chaucer. Dream Visions and Other Poems. Ed. Kathryn L. Lynch. New York: Norton, 2007.
Geoffrey Chaucer. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Stephen A. Barney. New York: Norton, 2006.
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue. Ed. V. A. Kolve
and Glending Olson. Second Edition. New York: Norton, 2005.

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

Shakespeare' s career as dramatist before 1603 (including Hamlet). Study of history plays, comedies, and tragedies.

Text: Bevington's--any edition.

The course surveys the major works of William Shakespeare thought to be produced in the reign of King James. Our focus will be performance spaces: the Renaissance theater in England, Shakespeare’s Globe and Blackfriars, and (this being Shakespeare after 1603) the space of modern cinema, where the playwright’s most enduring Jacobean works are adapted, translated, and transformed. We will cover at least three of the great tragedies – Macbeth, Othello, King Lear – along with a late-career romance, a “problem play,” and films by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Derek Jarman. The course will conclude with a short foray into the spaces of digital Shakespearean performance on the web and in contemporary video art.

Jeffrey Todd Knight

For this course, we will examine 5 novels that span 100 years, tracking the portrayal of love and its discontents in order to better understand what narrative reveals about such fundamental questions as what is the relationship between love, duty, and natural right; and what does a portrait of dangerous love say about the culture from which it arises? Readings will include The London Jilt (Anonymous), Love in Excess (Eliza Haywood), Amelia (Henry Fielding), Adeline Mowbray (Amelia Opie), and Persuasion (Jane Austen).

This course will serve as a general introduction to Romanticism in British literature between 1765 and 1830. It will focus on two particular literary responses to the Enlightenment: the emergence of Gothic fiction and the Romantic cult of Nature. Please expect to read four novels as well as healthy amounts of poetry and nonfiction prose.

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

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

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire was losing its grip on many of its external colonies and India was no exception. The Indian independence movement took full shape during this time and authors from both sides, including Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Rabrindranath Tagore captured national and individual struggles in novel form. In this course, we will position novels by British writers against their Indian contemporaries to more thoroughly comprehend the political, cultural and spatial ramifications of colonization and the emergence of modern nations. Students will consider how 20th century writers used the form to represent, negate, and even redesign the boundaries between England and India. In an attempt to focus the reading, this course will concentrate on the issues of mobility, race, national identity, dislocation, adaptation, colonialism and empire as they are written into the modern novel.

Central readings will include: Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore, Waiting for the Mahatma by R.K. Narayan, Untouchable by Mulk Anand Raj, Far to Seek by Maud Diver, and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, among others.

General Method of Instruction: Discussion.

Student Responsibilities and Evaluation: Course work includes a willingness to challenge one's current aesthetic values about British literature and keep an open mind; weekly engaged, in-person critical discussion; critical written analysis of novels and their relevant critical work. Evaluation will include oral presentations, essays and quizzes.

This course is a general introduction to modern Irish literature. After > a brief survey of 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 poem (or several shorter ones) by
> Yeats (one grade unit); attendance, quizzes, short written assignments
> (one grade unit); final (two grade units). Texts: Maria Edgeworth,
> Castle Rackrent (Oxford, World's Classics); W. B. Yeats, Early Poems
> (Dover Thrift); J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Dover
> Thrift); James Joyce, Dubliners (Dover Thrift); James Joyce, A Portrait
> of the Artist as a Young Man; Flann O'Brien, The Poor Mouth (Dalkey
> Archive Press); The Tain, Kinsella translation (Oxford ppb: OPTIONAL!);
> course pack (e-reserve).

“Novel, a, short story padded.”

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

Each writer's prejudices, tastes, background, and experience tend to limit the kinds of characters, actions, and settings he can honestly care about, since by nature of our mortality we care about what we know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike that which threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has no visible bearing on the safety of the people and things we love.

--John Gardner, The Art of Fiction


“In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I’, of imposing oneself upon other people,
of saying, ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ It’s an aggressive, even a
hostile act.”

--Joan Didion, “Why I Write”


“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax
a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

--Flannery O’Connor
“The Fiction Writer and His Country”

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

--Eleanor Roosevelt

This class in short fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it. The quotations above provide insights into course goals and methods: we will read and analyze each story as a means of investigating what subjects seemed conventionally unrepresented to certain writers who felt themselves culturally marginalized and, as Eleanor Roosevelt puts it, unable to tell the truth except in fiction. We will analyze stories in a variety of contexts to understand why the writers cared enough about the topics and themes of those stories to present them fictionally in print, often challenging the status quo and shocking the reading publics in the past as well as the present.

Course requirements include active, vocal, and critically thoughtful in-person participation in all class sessions; critical analysis in writing, via various approaches; a midterm and a final exam.

Required texts include Chartres, The Story and It’s Writer plus distributed stories (for you to download and print), and various UW English Studies databases, including Oxford References Online. We may analyze audiovisual adaptations of some of the stories.

The course syllabus will be distributed and discussed in the first class session and no pre-course add codes are available.

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

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

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

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

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

The course covers all the grammatical forms and structures of English and several ways to describe and represent (graph, diagram) 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 course investigates the language and culture of the Middle English period in England (1100-1500). We will examine Middle English texts with an eye to the cultural importance of written material and the shifting roles of literacy in early England. We will consider different kinds of texts: letters, instruction manuals, poems, saints' lives, court documents, scientific treatises, and religious or mystical writings. In our readings, we will encounter the differing relationships of English speakers to their language: the ways that French, English and Latin coexisted in this period, the ways that regional dialects of English divided up the linguistic landscape, the use of literacy as a means for ecclesiastical authority, the importance of gender for the use and change of English, the function of written texts prior to the advent of print culture.

Along the way, we will learn to read Middle English, and experience the excitement and challenges of early language. Although Middle English manuscripts appear very foreign at first, we find that early speakers of English had many of the same goals for their language use that we do: conducting business, expressing love, creating meaning, telling stories, teaching their children, insulting their neighbors. This class explores these purposes for language, finding the shared ground of English users over the centuries while analyzing our differences. No background in linguistics or medieval literature is required.

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

Life Is Short; Art Is Shorter. A course in very brief prose. In this course, students will read dozens of very short prose compositions (including prose-poems, lyric essays, short-short stories, trick stories, fraudulent artifacts, self-reflexive reviews, guilty eulogies, metaphysical contemplations), then attempt to write several of their own.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

In this intermediate level prose writing class, we will be reading and writing short fiction through the lens of form. The quarter will start with an exploration of traditional linear narratives, move on to a consideration of more experimental forms of short prose, and culminate with each student creating a physical book in which the text will reflect the specific form of the physical object. No previous art or book-making experience is necessary (I’ll be guiding you through the steps and providing basic supplies), but expect to do a LOT of reading and writing. Weekly short writing assignments, two complete stories, and the final book project.

Text: course reader

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Or vampires, or souvenir tea towels, or Keira Knightley. You could make an interesting course out of the modern Jane Austen industry, but maybe it’s time to see what she actually wrote. It can be very surprising. This course therefore offers an intensive reading of Austen in her words and in her time—text and context, but especially text. We will be reading four of the five major novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion. Students will develop a close familiarity with these works and their nuances of expression and meaning, as well as some knowledge of their vital place in the history of the novel. Response papers, reading quizzes, exams, critical paper.

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

Ireland has been a rich source of plays and playwrights for the last 300 years or so. This course will examine the contributions of Irish playwrights to the developments of drama and theater in the twentieth century. We’ll begin the course at the end of the nineteenth century with Wilde, Shaw, Lady Gregory and Yeats, and examine the relations between established London theaters and the evolution of a “national” theater in Ireland.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, The Abbey Theater in Dublin became a force for revitalizing dramatic arts in Ireland, and beyond, and we’ll focus on the variety of plays that were developed for that influential venue by such as Synge, O’Casey, Robinson, and others, as well as some later Irish plays (produced away from the Abbey), such as those by Beckett and Friel. We'll conclude with some contemporary plays which have reestablished a strong Irish presence in London, New York, and Seattle theaters (e.g., McPherson, McDonagh).

Required texts:


Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. New York: Oxford U Press, 1998.
Harrington, John P., ed. Modern And Contemporary Irish Drama. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.
McDonagh, Martin. The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays. New York: Knopf Doubleday (Vintage), 1998.

The limitations on the comparative analysis of literary fiction and the feature film are dominated by the socio-political situation of the two forms and disciplines which examine them. Literary fiction is an elite, privileged form--one which is legitimated by its commitment to an objective of excellence; however that is defined; while the feature film is produced by a commercial industry which is unable to survive without creating a popular audience. . . . The discomfort of the literary critic with popular cultural forms has a long and distinguished history . . . Similarly, film studies’ recognition of its situation as an area which has had to establish its respectability has produced a jealous wariness of the imperialism of other disciplines. . . . So the limited degree of intercourse that occurs between the two disciplines has to deal with suspicions of elitism and imperialism on the one hand, and accusations of ‘trendiness’ on the other.”

–Graeme Turner,
“National Fictions: Film, Fiction, and Culture”

“I've never been one of those people who compared the book and the movie of the book. That's never interested me because I've always separated them as two very distinct art forms, so I never got mad if the movie wasn't the book, or vice versa. I knew from a very young age that it was impossible to do that. I mean, you're talking about a 300-page novel versus an hour-and-a-half or two-hour movie. It's impossible to convey in a movie the entire experience of a novel, and I always knew that.”

–Sherman Alexie, fiction and screen writer


In conventional thought, print fictions and their film adaptations clash—one considered elite and literary, the other trendy and crass. This course challenges that conventional notion and celebrates both hybrid forms of literature as well as serious literary and cultural critical analysis. We will read print narratives and their film adaptations to test the benefits of analyzing narratives in multiple rather than singular formats, when the printed page “floats transformed.”

Course texts will include a variety of shorter and longer print narratives of various genres that have been adapted into film, such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Required critical reading includes Richard Barsam’s critical text Looking at Movies. We will also be accessing many scholarly as well as popular book and film reviews from our UW library databases.

Course requirements are rigorous and include reading print and film narratives critically; engaged, in-person weekly attendance and active participation in full class sessions, including screenings of films; critical and persuasive analyses in spoken and written formats using a variety of critical approaches; research and evaluation of online databases and their critical methodology; a midterm and a final examination.

The course syllabus will be distributed and discussed in the first class session and no pre-course add codes are available.

This course examines various phenomena related to the Serbo-Croatian language, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian languages. Concepts such as language death and language birth are explored. The relationship between dialect and language is analyzed. Notions of language politics, language standardization, and language codification in general and specifically in the Balkans are considered. Structures of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are briefly addressed for purposes of making linguistic comparisons. No prior knowledge of the language(s) is
necessary since most readings are general and students may work on any language(s) of their choice.

Once we establish a working knowledge of the structure and function of language, this course will examine the social, cultural, and economic forces that have led to the emergence of language variation based on region, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. We will then explore the ways both informal and institutionalized forms of linguistic discrimination affect the degrees of access to education, the labor force, and political institutions available to members of various groups in our society. Finally, in light of the post-1965 immigration of non-European people to this country, we will pay particular attention to the impact of both the English Only and the English Plus movements on second language speakers and learners living in the United States. Special interest will also be paid to the on-going discussions about the place of bilingualism and bidialectalism in home, community and school settings.

Catalog Description: Individual projects in various types of nonfictional prose, such as biographical sketches, informational reports, literary reviews, and essays.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Life Is Short; Art Is Shorter. A course in very brief prose. In this course, students will read dozens of very short prose compositions (including prose-poems, lyric essays, short-short stories, trick stories, fraudulent artifacts, self-reflexive reviews, guilty eulogies, metaphysical contemplations), then attempt to write several of their own.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This is a comparative course on the effects of transnational displacement and dislocation on culture, identity, and place as depicted in contemporary literature and cultural theory. In the era of globalization and the transnational movement of people, capital, technology, and media, as well as just about everything else, what kind of transnational modes of belonging, subjectivity, community, spatiality and temporality have been created? Historians, writers, and critics have documented the various ways in which the nation emerged as an imagined community (Benedict Anderson); we have yet to fully examine the diverse types of imagined communities, identities, and matrices of place and time (Bakhtin’s chronotopes) generated by transnational displacement. If the concepts of people belonging to a bounded and sovereign territory, community conceived as horizontal brotherhood, as well as homogeneous, empty time are the chief attributes of the nation, what takes their place in transnational literatures and cultures?

To be sure, all transnational displacements are not the same, and we will examine important paradigms featured in critical discussion on the topic: transnational migration (the movement of peoples from one nation to another); diaspora (scattered communities displaced over wide distances but held together by myths of the homeland); borderlands (transnational space centered on a geopolitical line).

Required course materials: Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez; Edouard Glissant, The Fourth Century; Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman; Francisco Jiménez, The Circuit,
and a Course Reader.

We will read various narratives in which history (both cultural and personal) plays a part in shaping the course of fictional events. These are not conventional "historical" novels, (no swashbuckling heroes, or endlessly detailed battle scenes). Instead we will study some difficult and perplexing books, whose authors realize that the linkage between "history" and "truth" is often uncertain. This applies as well to attempts to capture individual "histories": biography, memoirs, autobiographical fiction. Thus questions of memory, repression, and narrative technique become relevant to our inquiry, especially when they intersect with larger political, societal and cultural issues. We will focus our attention on writing produced in Britain during the twentieth-century. Among the texts we will be reading are D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, Katherine Mansfield's short stories, Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being and To the Lighthouse, Graham Swift's Waterland, and Ian McKuen's Atonement. In addition to active involvement in class discussions, students can expect to do some brief investigatory reports, a class presentation, an annotated bibliography, and a 15-20 page paper.

This seminar is one the four core courses developed by the campus-wide Textual Studies Program. Course credit will count toward the Textual Studies Ph. D. track in all participating departments and may count toward the Critical Theory concentration in Comparative Literature. This course is open to all graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Students completing this course will develop basic skills of literary scholarship (the use of literary archives; aspects of physical bibliography and the printing and production of books; scholarly editing; manuscript-based textual criticism) which will be of help for other courses.

The goal of this course is to challenge the assumption that textual theory and practice occupy a domain separate from literary theory and criticism, and from other disciplines such as art history, architecture, music or film studies. Confronting this territorial fallacy, the course will show that developments in contemporary theory have influenced, and at times radically altered, the direction of textual studies; and conversely, that textual scholars have often anticipated and conceptualized the speculations of theorists in intellectually provocative ways. The first part of the course will familiarize students with major theories of textual criticism and editorial traditions that address the concepts of authorship and authorial intention; the distinction between document, text, work and the physical book; "ideal" texts and transcendental hermeneutics; the relationship of biographical and sociological contexts to texts, and of creators to producers of literature; and the functions of readerships. It will also document contemporary controversies in textual editing (such as the challenge posed by Jerome McGann to established canons of editing), as well as debates about the editing of particular texts in Renaissance (especially Shakespeare), romantic (especially Keats and Mary Shelley) and modern literature (especially Joyce's Ulysses). Students completing this course will learn to scrutinize the texts they are using and develop awareness of the editorial and cultural ideologies that inform them. Assignments include brief response papers to selected readings and a final essay on one of the following subjects: a particular topic in textual theory; a critical edition reading text (with editorial rationale) of a poem or short story; a review of an exisiting edition and of controversies surrounding it; the textual history, transmission and alteration of a given literary or artistic work.

The second part of the course will explore the relevance of textual theory to the study of art and film adaptations of literary works, focusing on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The course will involve the participation of librarians, visiting faculty, and two distinguished external visitors who will spend a week in Seattle, offering two specialized seminars and a public lecture. They are: Professor Marta Werner, recipient of the distinguished Fredson Bowers prize in textual editing and author of books, electronic archives and editions on Emily Dickinson, Hannah Weiner, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne; and Michelangelo Zaccarello, Professor of Italian Philology at the University of Verona, recipient of the 2011 Editor’s Prize awarded by the Society of Textual Scholarship and author of numerous books and articles on Dante’s Comedy, early Italian texts, and Renaissance authors such as Torquato Tasso and Luigi Pulci.