This course is meant at once to introduce the literature, history, and literary history of Scotland while also providing outlines of, and opportunity for engagement with, the diverse forms that make up that literature.

Scotland occupies a unique place within the history of British art-making, at once a colony and not, a marginalized people group with a strong sense of clan (and only sometimes, national) identity that nevertheless managed to lead both religious and philosophical revolutions that shook the known world.
We owe them more than we generally think.

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 surveys figurations of the devil in literature, from John Milton’s fallen angel to the beastly Judge who presides over Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. We’ll study the form and function of texts across several genres, focusing on elements of literature including imagery, narration, and characterization. As we do, we’ll also consider the ethical and political significance of textual representations of Satan.

Course readings also include Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away, Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Master and Margarita, Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, excerpts from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and a variety of short fiction. At least one film will be shown, to be decided at a later date.

This course can be taken to fulfill the “W” requirement. Requirements include regular attendance and participation, presentations, midterm and final exams, and one 12-15 page final essay.

In this course, we will explore a variety of literary forms by reading a series of works that belong to different genres (poetry, drama, short story, fairy tale, novel, film) but share an interest in the figure of the storyteller or narrator. How does the difference between a first-person narrator and a third-person narrator affect the experience of reading? What about an unreliable narrator? Sometimes, particularly in contemporary literature, a character becomes aware of operating within a story. Questions of storytelling become complicated in texts with multiple narrators (such as Dracula) and in texts belonging to genres that tend to lack explicit storytelling figures (such as drama, film, and poetry). As we keep in mind the general question as to how stories are told, we will close-read each text and interrogate its relationship to the era and culture that produced it. Texts will include traditional and contemporary fairy tales; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; excerpts from several other nineteenth-century British novels; Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”; one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; a variety of poems; and the films Stranger than Fiction, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Atonement.

Assignments: two graded, out-of-class essays (5-7 pages), one of which will be revised into a longer final paper. Informal response papers will be assigned in order to stimulate class participation; quizzes may be given. Each student will give one short presentation at some point in the quarter.

Most readings will be collected in the required coursepack. The books required for purchase are Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (any edition) and the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This specific edition of Dracula is necessary, as we will use some of the critical essays included in that edition.

Book List:
Coursepack
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ISBN 978-0-393-97012-8
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, ISBN 9780811216029


James Thurber, “The Little Girl and the Wolf”
Opening of Great Expectations and/or Jane Eyre
Pilot of How I Met Your Mother
Perrault “Little Red Riding Hood”
Opening of third-person Dickens or George Eliot novel
One Sherlock Holmes story, TBD
A.S. Byatt, “The Story of the Eldest Princess” and “The Thing in the Forest”
Stranger than Fiction
Dracula
Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
A Streetcar Named Desire, read the play and watch the movie
Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” excerpt
Atonement (film)
A selection of poetry throughout the quarter, including confessional poetry, a Shakespeare sonnet, a Hopkins “terrible sonnet,” a couple of broody Romantic poems, Sylvia Plath, Lyn Hejinian

Samuel Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren is an enormous, and enormously complicated, work of science fiction that, by interweaving various forms of prose around (at least partly) the production and reception of a book of poetry, portrays the experiences of a newcomer to a city that is mysteriously cut off from the rest of the world. His 1999 book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue places two long essays side by side – one a personal essay about his experiences as a gay black male through four decades in New York City, one a critical essay about the relationship between the space of the city and the kinds of existence that are made possible by that space.

This quarter, we’ll be reading both of these books and several of Delany’s short stories, along with a number of critical and theoretical texts (including essays or excerpts from Michele de Certeau, Anne Cvetkovich, Walter Benjamin, Michael Warner, Donna Haraway, and others) as we study, discuss, and write about the ways in which the intersections of race, sexuality, trauma, violence, and urban space that occur within the context of Delaney’s works are manifest differently in the different forms that work takes.

This will be a reading-intensive and content-intensive course; students can expect to be assigned approximately 150 pages of reading per week, much of it challenging on the levels of vocabulary, structure, argument, emotion, and ideology. Students who have not taken at least ENGL 111, 121, or 131 may struggle to keep up with the workload.
Assignments will include at least 15 pages of graded writing, with some opportunities for revision based on instructor comments and in-class work.

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.

In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon writes that “art is derived from other art; stories are born of other stories.” This course explores the literary works for which this is most explicitly true—those based on other literary works, including prequels and sequels, retellings, adaptations to other genres and media, parodies, and creative literary criticism. As we trace the intertextual relationships between works, we will consider questions about the processes of literary history, the nature of creativity and authorship, commercialism and cultural prestige, and the politics of appropriation. In addition to extensive reading, course requirements will include response papers, a presentation, and two formal papers. Authors may include Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Bishop, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Cunningham, Daniel Dafoe, Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, Jean Rhys, Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf.

CHID 205 / English 205 Professor Leroy Searle Winter Quarter, 2012 EXED 110 12:30-1:20 M-F This course is part of the core curriculum of the Comparative History of Ideas program, offered in two concurrent sections: CHID 205 and ENGL 205. It makes absolutely no difference the section in which you are enrolled. The course pursues an intensive and demanding series of readings in Western intellectual and cultural history, with primary texts drawn from philosophy, literature, and the history and philosophy of science. The sequence of readings is precisely ordered, where problems that arise in one text are pursued and elaborated in the text or texts which follow. The title of the course reflects its organizing premise: that the primary focus of Western intellectual culture is sustained inquiry, in which method and imagination are constantly intertwined. In many ways, this course is offered as a fundamental introduction to authors and ideas that have shaped Western thought and culture. It is designed to open pathways to study in many other programs and departments, and its intent is to involve you directly with the examination of fundamental conceptions that are implicated in virtually everything else you think.

Two matters are of exceptional importance: your ability to read challenging material precisely, and to be able to express yourself in writing with accuracy and insight. The course carries “W" credit (writing intensive) following the guidelines of the College of Arts and Sciences. There is nothing in the course that is easy or light, but there is also nothing that is beyond the abilities of a reasonably intelligent undergraduate. I think I can offer well grounded assurance that you will find the material interesting and consequential, and that you will not be bored.

"If an exploration of a particular culture will lead to a heightened understanding of a work of literature produced within that culture, so too a careful reading of a work of literature will lead to a heightened understanding of the culture within which it was produced"

--Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture”

"Culture shapes the way we think; it tells us what “makes sense.” It holds people together by providing us with a shared set of customs, values, ideas, and beliefs, as well as a common language. We live enmeshed in this cultural web; it influences the way we relate to others, the way we look, our tastes, our habits; it enters our dreams and desires. But as culture binds us together it also selectively blinds us. As we grow up, we accept ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking and being that might best be characterized as cultural frames of reference or cultural myths. These myths help us to understand our place in the world—our place as prescribed by our culture. They define our relationships to friends and lovers, to the past and future, to nature, to power, and to nation. Becoming a critical thinker means learning how to look beyond these cultural myths and the assumptions embedded in them.”

--Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle
Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing_

“Culture,” as Stephen Greenblatt goes on to explain in his essay, is defined by the traditions, beliefs, customs, habits and practices of a society, all of which form the basis of social institutions. Practitioners of cultural criticism assume that all of us—citizens, readers, politicians, children, shoppers, stock brokers, authors, directors, baristas, literary critics, etc.--are products consciously or unconsciously of our culture.
In this class, we will become practitioners of cultural criticism, augmenting more traditional ways of interpreting meaning and value in literary texts. This methodology will allow us to mine the cultural assumptions and myths sometimes deeply embedded in an author’s or filmmaker’s text, relate those assumptions to real-world social contexts, and, finally, decide to what degree the textual representation of that culture invites us to cultivate, critique, or even condemn its frames of reference and mythologies. Requirements include weekly participation (this is not an online course), in-class engaged, vocal, and thoughtful class discussion in larger and smaller groups; short essays and objective quizzes, a final examination.

How is power exercised through culture? In what ways do our everyday entertainments and recreations condition us politically? This class will challenge you with at times demanding readings in recent theories of Cultural Studies, then task you to apply these framings in real time to contemporary cultural artifacts. What kind of subject cohesions are constituted in Game of Thrones? Does Starcraft destabilize hegemonic articulations of space? How does Justin Bieber re/produce intersectionalities of gender and age? What work is being done through contested analogies of race in HBO's Girls? If you are up for wrestling with extensive readings on contemporary theories of power, then exercising your developing critique through application to popular culture in daily discussions and 10-15 pages of graded writing, this class should suit you well.

This course will focus on a variety of texts from the English Restoration (1660) through the mid-1700s. We will read both “high literature,” such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, and “low literature,” including stories about prostitutes and criminals, in order to question the difference between the two types. Besides our primary text, we will also read a good amount of contemporary contextual material.

The class will be a combination of lecture and discussion. You should expect quite a bit of reading, including a good deal of poetry, fiction and nonfiction prose—also, be aware that the dates of our texts mean that our reading will be, in some ways, substantially different from the kind of writing with which most of us are familiar and will thus pose difficulties for some. You should also be prepared to participate regularly in discussion. Please expect a midterm and a final exam, and a short paper (5 pp.).

Note for current and prospective English majors: this class will satisfy your pre-1900 requirement. Please keep in mind, however, that as a 200-level class it will be geared primarily toward non-majors.

Texts:
• Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume C (Norton), 9780393912517
• Paradise Lost (Parallel Prose Edition) (Broadview Press), 9781554810970
• Moll Flanders (Broadview Press), 9781551114514
• Joseph Andrews (Broadview Press), 9781551112206

The literary works of the twentieth century frequently grapple with the social and cultural concerns of the age, such as war, racial prejudice, technological progress, and urbanization. But these works are also marked by a spirit of experimentation and sometimes a conscious effort to do things differently than the ways in which they’d been done before. Thus, in modernist and postmodernist literature, we often see writers questioning accepted notions of form, genre, subject matter, and style. What, after all, makes a story worthy of being told? What should a poem look like? What constitutes a character? Are stories made up of events that happen to us, or are they about the ways in which we think or feel about these things?

This class will explore these questions and more, through a range of literary works from the twentieth century and just beyond. We will consider characteristics, such as fragmentation, complexity, and a resistance to linearity, which are considered indicative of modernism and postmodernism, and we will also discuss the difficulties of definitively categorizing something as “modernist” or “postmodernist.”

Readings will include the following novels: Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), Passing (Nella Larsen), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino), and City of Glass (Paul Auster). The course packet will likely include excerpts from longer works by theorists of modernism and postmodernism, some poetry (though we will spend most of our time on prose fiction), a short play by Samuel Beckett, and a number of short stories by authors such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Luis Borges, Haruki Murakami, Shelley Jackson, and Jonathan Safran Foer.

This is a survey course and will involve quite a bit of reading, some of it difficult. On the upside, much of it will be interesting. This course will also emphasize close reading and critical thinking, as well as the development of well-supported arguments. Course requirements will include multiple short written responses, as well as a 5-7 page final paper. The course may also include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes and free-writes.



4. Book List:

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (Hussey Ed.). ISBN: 0156030357

Larsen, Nella. Passing (Penguin Classics Edition). ISBN: 0142437271

Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Weaver Translation). ISBN: 0156439611

Auster, Paul. City of Glass. ISBN: 0140097317

*There will also be a photocopied course pack.

In this course, we will read four of Shakespeare’s plays and his sonnets through a variety of lenses to consider the aesthetic and cultural work of Shakespeare, as well as the impact of his legacy on literature. We will consider problems of performance, adaptation, form, structure, and textual reliability. Our themes of order and chaos will emerge through discussion of Shakespeare’s representations of politics, marriage, gender, families, and social structures. Requirements include regular participation, weekly short response papers, two medium–length essays, and sonnet memorization.

Texts (all Shakespeare):
• As You Like It (Broadview Press), 9781554810529
• Henry V (New Cambridge Shakespeare), 9780521612647
• King Lear (Broadview Press), 9781551119670
• Hamlet (Oxford World's Classics), 9780199535811
• Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford World's Classics), 9780199535798

This course is designed to cover critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods. In this course we will explore the idea of the West in American fiction. Since the arrival of European settlers in the “New World,” the idea of the West has maintained a powerful hold on the American imagination. Alternately portrayed as an untouched Eden and a hostile wilderness, the West has been not just a geographic location but an idea that has shaped the American consciousness. The historical pressures which helped shaped the West—such as Manifest Destiny, Indian removal, slavery, urbanization, and imperialism—simultaneously engaged complex, frequently violent questions revolving around issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Our investigation of the West will examine these issues over three centuries of American fiction, as we explore how the West shaped American identity.

Our readings will cover short stories, novels, and essays, with our primary authors likely to include James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, among others. Because this class satisfies the “W” credit, the course will also be writing intensive, with 10-15 pages of writing and required revision. There will also be reading quizzes, tests, group presentations, and in-class activities.

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

In this section of English 242, we will read and analyze a selection of ?dystopian? literature. We will begin with the definition of ?dystopia? as the antonym of utopia (an imaginary ?perfect? a dystopia is a world so imperfect that it is quite unpleasant for many of its inhabitants. We will work throughout the quarter to refine and complicate this initial definition. We will consider how authors use ?dystopia? to critique environmental destruction, poverttotalitarianism, corporations, political repression, and other social ills. Questions that drive this course include: What is the function of dystopian literature within the societies that produce it? To what extent are the boundary between ?utopia? and ?dystopia? subj Is dystopian literature all critique and caution, or does can it offer a vision for a better world? What is the role of dystopian literature in social movements? How does dystopian literature offer a critique of the author?s present society? How can dystopian literature act a social theory?

Text selections may excerpts or complete texts from the following: ?Th Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? by Ursula K. LeGuin, Weby Yevgeny Zamyatin, V for Vendettaby Alan Moore, The Handmaid?s Ta leby Margar Atwood, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and The Iron Heelby Jack London.

This course fulfills the University of Washington?s W-requirement. Iwill include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing. You will learn the skill of ?close reading? in order to critically anal literature. You will write claim-driven essays that interpret course texts; in these essays you will support your interpretation through analyzed and well-reasoned evidence.
The course will also likely include a in-class quizzes, presentations, and short writing assignments.*

This quarter we will examine representations of education in prose fiction. We will consider in particular why writers choose to make arguments about education in the form of the novel. The texts we read span the twentieth century and enter into conversations about nation building, identity formation, literacy, and assimilation in the U.S. school system. How do authors use the form of the novel to make arguments about education in the U.S.? How does fiction participate in wider cultural conversations about education and national identity? To think through these questions, course reading will include essays and newspaper articles about the educational system in the U.S. (including Seattle) alongside fictional texts. Assignments and class time will be used to practice close reading skills as a way to interpret both fictional and nonfictional texts. Primary authors might include W.E.B. DuBois, Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, Americo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldua, R. Zamora Linmark, Paul Beatty, and Jesmyn Ward.

This class offers a “W” credit requiring 10-15 pages of graded writing over the quarter. Students will likely be asked to write two
shorter papers and one longer paper to meet this requirement.

BRUCE STERLING argues in the introduction of the 1986 anthology Mirrorshades that “cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world” (xi). Even as cyberpunk looked to the future, according to the introduction, “a final oddity of our generation in SF” is that, for writers like Sterling, William Gibson, and others, “the literature of the future has a long and honored past” (xv). It is this past, present, and future of cyberpunk fiction and culture that will be the occasions for close reading, thoughtful exploration, and critical analysis. What might cyberpunk reveal to us, reveal about us, and reveal about the world we live in? We will consider a “long history” of cyberpunk that stretches the whole of the twentieth century, looking back at cyberpunk’s predecessors, up through cyberpunk’s heyday, and into the twenty-first century, what might be called post-cyberpunk. Readings will include in whole or in part: Aldous Huxley, Vannevar Bush, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Larissa Lai, and Ernest Cline.

A REQUIREMENT for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. In other words, this class is about reading, critiquing, and analyzing our culture through literature. Our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various fictions and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in.

FINALLY, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts—from fiction to scholarship to visual and digital—and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience. The class counts for W credit, requiring you to complete 10-15 pages of revised writing including a set of short response papers culminating in a longer major paper project.

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

This class will serve as an introduction to reading, interpreting, appreciating, engaging with, and responding to poetry in English. We will consider poems in terms of form (meter, rhyme, etc.), content/theme, and cultural/historical/literary context.

Special attention will be paid to the effects of poetry on the body—we’ll be paying close attention to the ways in which we literally /feel/ and experience poetry—through reading aloud, through empathizing physically with the authors and the narrators or “speakers” of the poems, and through taking note of our kinesthetic experiences while reading poems.

We’ll use as our texts poems in English from about the past 150 years, including (among others) Gerard Manly Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Richard Hugo, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert
Pinsky, Jorie Graham, Susan Stewart, Heather McHugh, Joe Wenderoth, Richard Siken, and Dorothea Lasky.

While there may be an occasional lecture, class discussion will serve as our primary mode of engagement. Course activities will likely include: memorization, presentations, and writing poetry in order to internalize poetic forms.

This course fulfills the university's "W" requirement. As such, you'll write three brief (2-3 page) response papers, one of which you'll expand into a longer paper (of 10-12 pages) which will undergo a major revision. You will also write a book review of one book of poetry by a living poet.

John Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, spent most of his adult life on display as a freak attraction throughout Europe in the late 19^th century. During the same time period, Chang & Eng Bunker, General Tom Thumb, and Zip the What-Is-It? were working on the American side show circuit, making a profit (and usually enabling others to profit from) the performance of their bodily differences. The freak show as a performance genre coalesces a number of complex relationships between
the self and the other, the normal and the freakish, the abled and disabled (among other things). But for however problematic it may be, the heyday of the side show remains one of the few periods in American popular culture where “othered” bodies were widely represented on public stages.

This course seeks to investigate the representation of disability and bodily otherness in dramatic literature. We will read a variety of plays featuring characters with disabilities, ranging from Shakespeare’s /Richard III/ to more contemporary works such as Suzan-Lori Parks’s /Venus/. In addition to plays, we will also study the genre of side show “freak” performance in the late 19^th century and contemporary iterations of side show performances, such as performance art cabarets
by Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz or the Jim Rose Circus. In close reading these texts and performances, we will consider the following questions: How do we narrate disability? How we articulate otherness in a script? How, too, does staging construct and model reactions to and interactions with disabled bodies? How have historical representations of disability changed and how are these changes reflected in dramatic literature?

This course satisfies the “W” requirement, which means that students can expect to produce 10-15 pages of writing on the above texts over the course of the quarter.

4. Book List

/Richard III,/ William Shakespeare (ISBN: 978-0451526953)
/The Octoroon,/ Dion Boucicault (ISBN: 978-1162703619)
/The Glass Menagerie,/ Tennessee Williams (ISBN: 978-0811214049)
/Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,/ Tennessee Williams (ISBN: 978-0811216012)
/The Miracle Worker,/ William Gibson (ISBN: 978-0573612381)
/Signs of Life,/ Joan Shankar (ISBN: 978-0819563231)
/The Elephant Man,/ Bernard Pomerance (ISBN: 978-0802130419)
/Children of a Lesser God,/ Mark Medoff (ISBN: 978-0822202035)
/Venus,/ Suzan-Lori Parks (ISBN: 978-0822215677)
Coursepack (including selections from /Porgy & Bess/ by George & Ira
Gershwin and /The Freak and the Showgirl/ by Mat Fraser & Julie Atlas Muz)

This course serves as an introduction to American literature and culture. However, rather than treating “American literature” as a defined and stable concept, we will explore the contradictions and contestations that are at work when we speak of American literature as an organizing framework. In order to do this we will investigate the following questions: What is “American” about “classic” examples of American literature? What roles do historical, social, political, and economic factors play in producing and critiquing the concept of American literature? Conversely, what roles does literature play in producing and critiquing the nation? Ultimately, these questions will help us consider how literature participates in and problematizes American culture specifically and national cultures broadly.

The responses we develop in relation to these questions will be situated in our reading and discussion of a broad survey of texts including literary narratives, historical essays, cultural documents, and secondary sources from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. As we engage the above questions we will also consider how the reading list for this class reinforces and resists the assumptions and logics that underpin the various definitions of American literature that we are exploring. In other words, how does our reading list respond to the questions listed above regarding the definition of American literature? How do these texts—read both separately and collectively—define “America”? What does it mean to read these particular texts in the context of an American literature survey course at the university?

Assessment will be based on a combination of in-class participation, short homework assignments, group presentations, an essay-question mid-term, and a final paper.

Short readings for the class will be made available via course reserve or course pack. In addition to these short readings the following texts will be required:
• Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
• Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893)
• Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
• Silko, Ceremony (1977)
• Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

What does it mean to say that American political culture is dominated by several mutually constitutive "political rationalities"? How do fictional depictions of the future reflect present social and political conditions, problems, and desires? How does pop culture legitimate, reinforce, or speak against power inequalities pervading the contemporary United States? Have we moved beyond the need to talk about racial and gender inequality in America today? How are we conditioned to think about the meanings of liberty, opportunity and equality in America today? What do various notions of the "post-" suggest, and what do they have in common?

This course will focus on the ways in which contemporary fiction, film and television reflect, reinforce, and perhaps resist three dominant and interrelated political rationalities of the early 21st-century United States: the rationality of neoliberalism, the rationality of the post-racial state, and the rationality of post-feminism.

Course readings and concepts will be drawn from the fields of political theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, and contemporary American literature.

Students will be required to purchase a course packet containing reading materials (drawn from political theory, critical legal studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and the social sciences) as well as three novels: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2011) Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries (2002) Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)

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.

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

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

Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story through discussion and exploration of writing techniques and process. You will read a variety of published short stories, undertake writing exercises, and write and revise one short story, all the while challenging yourself to try different techniques and styles. The course is organized around the principle that in order to understand how fiction works, you must immerse yourself in it, both by reading closely and by writing copiously.

The main goal of this class is to begin to learn how to write short stories, bearing in mind that learning how to write is an ongoing process. We’ll undertake this goal by discussing concepts behind writing and reading fiction, as well as by analyzing published fiction. You will be expected to complete weekly writing exercises (1-3 pages), with an emphasis on creative techniques and crafts. By the end of the quarter, you will have workshopped a draft of your short story, and handed in a revised final version (10-15 pages).

Book List
-Course packet to be picked up at the Ave Copy Center
Steele, Alexander, Ed. Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

This course provides theoretical basics and practical training in the analysis of narrative form. Discussions will be based on five 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 studies, and the class is reading-intensive. The novels below will be read in chronological order. Texts: Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Signet Classic or any edn); George Eliot, Silas Marner (any edn); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford Worlds Classics); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin). There will be a substantial course-reserve of critical essays. Several short assignments and a final exam/paper (last day of class).

The final grade will be determined as follows: 40% short assignments (graded pass/fail) and participation; 60% final exam or paper (to be determined).

Writers write; readers read. What process connects one to the other? This is a course in the problematics of reading fiction, by which I mean attention to (1) the fascinations, affects, identifications, and mysteries that happen when we read, and (2) the particular secrets of style and story that writers use to help determine how and why we live (or not) in the worlds they create. We'll ask such questions as: What forms do the weird pleasures, wild emotions, and secret seductions of fiction take as texts and as psychic structures? How, exactly, do we "take in" fiction? How much control does the author have over how readers experience a novel world? Do we read differently when we're reading across gender or sexuality or ethnicity? Why do some readers choose puzzle novels while others prefer love stories? Can we love novels if they are about things we hate? Do we identify with characters who seem in many ways to be our opposites? We'll read two classic modern novelists (probably Woolf and one other); two classic contemporary novels: (probably Beloved [Morrison] and A Gesture Life [Lee]) and one recent graphic novel: Fun Home (Bechdel), together with some work in narrative and reading theory. Discussion will be at the heart of what we do, so come expecting lots of talk and lively differences of opinion. By the end of the course you will have the language and tools necessary to discuss fiction analytically in future classes and in life more generally. And equally important, you’ll have a stronger sense of why you, personally, love or hate the fiction you read.

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 fictional texts. 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.

We will read a variety of poems and fictional works from France, Germany, England, and the U.S. in order to get a sense of the complex phenomenon called “Modernism.” Modernism is a style, or cluster of styles, of writing that flourished from roughly 1910-1930, but the beginnings of which can be traced to France in the mid-19th century. Modernist writers explored areas of experience that literature had formerly neglected (extreme or even pathological states of mind, commonplace things and people, sexuality and other corporeal processes, and so forth), and in the course of this exploration they moved away from traditional literary forms, inventing radically new forms (of which the most familiar are free verse and stream of consciousness).

The first half of the course will be on the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke, and T. S. Eliot; the second half on fictional works by Kafka (Metamorphosis, Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, and Camus (The Stranger). You do not need to know anything about how to read poetry; I will teach you everything you need to know.

There will be a 2-3 page paper on Baudelaire due the second week (worth 20% of your grade); a 4-5 page mid-term paper on Rilke and Eliot (40 %); and a final, 4-5 page, paper on modernist fiction (40%). Your entire grade will be based on these three papers.

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.

Many authors of the Restoration and early eighteenth century were interested in exploring questions of “character” in their texts. What did it mean to have a reputable character at this time? What were the consequences of being known as someone with ill character? How can one tell if the characters one encounters on streets and between the pages of literary works are authentic, or merely a performance?

Richard Steele’s Spectator No. 370, offers a particularly literary approach to this cultural question of character:

“It is certain that if we look all round us, and behold the different Employments of Mankind, you hardly see one who is not, as the Player is, in an assumed Character…
Consider all the different Pursuits and Employments of Men, and you will find half their Actions tend to nothing else but Disguise and Imposture; and all that is done which proceeds not from a Man's very self, is the Action of a Player” (May 5, 1712).

Here, Steele’s inability to distinguish between “assumed” and authentic “Characters,” and the behaviors that emerge from “a Man’s very self” or those rooted in “Imposture,” threaten his aim to influence and control the tastes and behaviors of his periodical readers.

Taking Steele’s dilemma into account, we too will use these questions of self-definition and character as a starting point for our literary and historical analysis. How do the poets, dramatists, and novelists we will read demarcate the boundary between performativity and authenticity, between the theater and “real” life? Are their characters being themselves or merely playing a part? How do authors privilege authenticity over performativity, or vice versa?

Our course readings will cover fiction, poetry, and drama. A sampling of our readings includes: Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, John Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe,” Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” William Congreve’s The Way of the World, and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.

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

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

Requirements and grading:

--memorizing (and reciting) 50 (or more) lines of poetry by W. B. Yeats: this task is the midterm and must be completed by 2/6 (one grade unit);

--attendance, quizzes, short written assignments (one grade unit);

--final (two grade units).

Texts: The Tain, Ciaran Carson tr. (Penguin) or Thomas Kinsella tr. (Oxford ppb). Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray: online at UW libraries (electronic resource). Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford, World's Classics). W. B. Yeats, The Yeats Reader (Scribner). J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Dover Thrift); James Joyce, Dubliners (Dover Thrift); Flann O'Brien, The Poor Mouth (Dalkey Archive Press). Look for inexpensive used/online purchases! 340 Course Pack (e-reserve).

This course attempts to frame the contemporary interest in apocalypticism (zombie, nuclear, viral, or otherwise) by tracing the history of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. While our primary focus will be on science-fiction, we’ll push the boundaries of the genre by considering a range of nineteenth and twentieth century texts that imagine the world after its destruction.
Course readings will likely include, among other items, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

This course can be taken to fulfill the “W” requirement. Requirements include regular attendance and participation, presentations, midterm and final exams, and one 12-15 page final essay.

This course will focus on contemporary poetics of Native North America, from “traditional” oral and written literature, to contemporary written and spoken-word performance, along with a variety of multigeneric readings that will inform students regarding the socio-historical, cultural and literary contexts from which the poetry emerges. Since “tradition” can be described as “practices that maintain and reinforce a continuous connection within a group,” we will seek to understand why and how Native North American poetry can be considered traditional, as well as why and how this poetry reflects an Indigenous identity and worldview. A look at the colonial educational practices and policies for American Indians in the United States will provide context for the often caustic criticisms of colonial domination expressed in Native poetry. Next, through an in-depth discussion and study of appropriation, students will gain conceptual framework that will expose the power-flows at play when Native writers strategically incorporate Euro-American literary formal devices as a means of resistance. Students will also become familiar with the way that self-conscious and well-crafted genre-bending strategically unsettles Euro-American colonial authority in terms of aesthetics, definitions, boundaries, identity, bodies, lives, and places. Despite the sometimes gritty depiction of Indigenous experience in some Native American poetry, students will encounter numerous poetic voices that reject the role of victim or subjugation through trickster play, humor, and the celebratory enactments of survivance.

This course will examine the concept of the undead, broadly constructed. We will look at literature and films dealing with representations of ghosts, vampires, zombies, and reincarnation, in addition to other constructions of the undead. Readings for the course will include Shelley's Frankenstein, Le Fanu's Carmilla, Dick's Ubik, and Boffa's You're an Animal, Viskovitz! as well as other works, such as selected Greek myths, fairy tales, and graphic novels.

Modernity’s unprecedented assertion of human rights has been an equally unprecedented disaster for our fellow creatures. Never before have humans so systematically slaughtered and tortured the other animals on the planet in service of their own needs. To boot, human-caused global warming threatens the survival of as much as 65 percent of the known species on the planet. How is it that we have come to be at war with our animal nature? Has it always been that way or is it something about how humans have come to view themselves in the wake of the Enlightenment and its civilizing processes that now threatens the very survival of our fellow creatures. These are the questions that will frame discussions in this course. We will pursue a loose historical trajectory, beginning with antiquity, to consider how previous ages have understood their relations with the animal kingdom. We will be also interested in how privileging the human has led to the dehumanization and slaughter of so-called lesser humans. Finally, we will consider the role of the human, if any, at the end of days when, according. to the Book of Isiah, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat

Course format: Lecture and discussion

Course requrements: Two short essays and a final longer essay (It may be possible to take the course for “W”credit.).

Readings include: Ovid, The Metamorphosis (excerpts); Aristotle (excerpts various works); essays from Montaigne and Descartes; H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau; Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale” from Moby Dick; Virginia Woolf, Flush; Edward Albee, The Goat; and Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, We Three (a graphic novel). On occasion we will also consider selected chapters from The Old Testament.

What You Can Expect to Learn in This Class:
How the current environmental crisis can be traced to our changed relations with the animal kingdom;
How to historicize texts and refuse naturalizing the present;
How to read closely and compose a coherent and cogent essay based on those readings.

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

URL: davidshields.com

No book orders. Course packet available from Ave Copy. Course packet is Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: An Anthology of Very Brief Prose, with lengthy introduction and extensive commentary by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman.

An intermediate course in the art of prose. Students will read dozens of very short stories and very brief essays, then write their own versions of these exemplary stories—collages, lovers’ quarrels, “trick stories,” prose-poems, parables, etc.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft of fiction or creative nonfiction. Readings in contemporary prose and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

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

The “setting” of a literary text is sometimes envisaged as if it were an inert physical surround, already existing ahead of time, into which characters were being inserted, and whose surrounding reality authors were somehow describing as if representing something independent of the formative powers of consciousness and imagination. But if the “focal center,” as Thoreau writes specifically the spectacular impact of autumn foliage, is “between” the observer and the observed, this is more generally true of all that seems to take place “out there” as the setting of literary texts. It’s true that in an era of US national expansion across a landscape wherein the “destiny” of the nation is already assumed to be “manifest,” much that is projected outward into space by maps, paintings and other mechanisms hides its projective power. But in reaction, American writers develop a counter-sensitivity to the way sense of landscape and space—and in Melville’s case, the visualization of the city and the sea--actually remains unsettled: in the play of maps, paintings, images, and deeply rooted assumptions that can contradict one another, somewhat the way shifting images, based on alternative perspectives, reorganize what one seems to see in an Escher etching or Rorschach ink blot. Thoreau, for example, discovers that as he learns native tribal languages, he actually learns to see the same forest in an entirely different manner from the way it is perceived through a gaze rooted in Western European culture and science. Moreover, numerous writers during this period exploit such an insight into the perceptual fluidity of space to evolve fresh possibilities of visibility in the here and now. We’ll be reading a series of nineteenth-century American texts that enact such metamorphic visualization and that highlight the creative powers of the gaze, from Poe’s strange journeys into the Antarctic to Thoreau’s artful descriptions of nature to the way gazing is both enacted and meditated upon in Moby-Dick.

Readings: 1) selections from literary scholarship and visual theory—available on e-reserve—which will supplement our primary readings of literary materials; 2) readings available either at the Bookstore or on e-reserve in Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, Melville, Whitman, and Gilman.

This course explores the representation of human reproduction in contemporary fiction, theory and film. It begins from the premise that research on the human genome, the rapid development of reproductive technologies, and the rise of what some critics have called “biocapitalism” have together transformed contemporary reproductive experience, practice, and, too, the creative imagination. How are changes in human reproduction reflected and refracted in the visual and literary texts that we produce and consume? How has the engineering of life itself been taken up in various genres of writing (science fiction, speculative fiction, philosophical and other non-fiction prose)? How do the array of cultural productions that examine the changing reproductive landscape shape our understandings of human life and its reproduction in the present, and, too, in a future yet to come? Some prior exposure to literary and/or feminist theory will be extremely useful, but is not required as a prerequisite for this course. This will be a reading and writing intensive course that can serve as a senior capstone.

. We book lovers have had our hearts stolen, our minds remapped, and been transported to a different world by at least one book. Because you can never take the same journey twice, rereading a beloved book can reveal new insights, into the reader as well as the book. In this course we’ll focus on the experience of reading, exploring the difference between first readings and subsequent readings, discovering how the book is never the same and how we change as readers trekking across readings and through time. In addition to Anne Fadiman’s Rereadings, a collection of essays by diverse writers on the surprises and insights rereading brings, shorts from The Book that Changed My Life by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen, and a modest selection of articles, you will work closely with a book you choose to revisit. This is a writing-intensive course; assignments include regular reflective exercises to log your journeys, formal essays you develop through rereading and revision, and a portfolio essay to sum it all up. To prepare for this class, begin thinking about some of those old bound loves you yearn to revisit. Works of literature you read several years ago when you were in another time and place will be good candidates. For now, please don’t start rereading! You have memories to plumb first. Hopefully, when you do reread your selection, the experience will leave both you and the book you revisit changed. And you, dear traveler, will have a deepened appreciation for who you are as a reader and the role reading can play in your present and future journey.

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).

Drawing inspiration from Raymond William's influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s Keywords for American Cultural Studies, this class will identify and explore some of the key concepts, moves, and key terms of the interdisciplinary fields that make up lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies. Topics, themes, methods, and lines of inquiry will include histories of sexuality and sexual identity; the politics of identity, embodiment, and desire; heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia, normativity, and other forms of oppression; queer resistance, activism, liberation, and worldmaking; intersectionality with race, gender, class, family, religion, ability, and nation; and finally, queer temporalities, spaces, and technologies. Through the lenses of literature, scholarship, new and old media, and popular culture, our class will trace and trouble theoretical and everyday understandings of LGBT and Q terms, figures, bodies, and experiences. Williams argued, "I have emphasized this process of the development of Keywords because it seems to me to indicate its dimension and purpose. It is not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject. It is not a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words. It is, rather, the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings" This class therefore is all about reading, thinking, writing, and contributing to LGBT studies' shared body of words, ideas, and theories. Texts may include in whole or in part: Michel Foucault, Allucqere Rosanne Stone, Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, Allen Ginsberg, Gayle S. Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Kobena Mercer, John D’Emilio, Lee Edelman, James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, Susan Stryker, Samuel Delany, Michael Warner, Roderick A. Ferguson, Donna Haraway, Nella Larsen, Alan Turing, Nina Wakeford, and others.

Although teaching writing might seem like a fairly straightforward endeavor, the field of composition was and is marked by vigorous debate about proper methodologies and pedagogies. We will start with a historical overview of how composition as a method has been viewed and taught at the secondary and university level. With that contextualization in mind, we will then explore the dominant composition theories that have developed over the past sixty years (or so).

Teaching someone how to write is not a neutral act. We will discuss how these different perspectives on teaching writing reveal political and sociocultural assumptions, situations where these assumptions are/are not problematic, and places of strategy for circumventing deleterious effects.

Throughout the course, we will consider how the above applies to teaching writing in a theoretical sense as well as what these considerations look like in high school and university writing situations. In short, the aim is for you to leave this class with theoretical attitudes and pedagogical strategies that will help you be a successful writing teacher.

Class Assignments:

You will write and produce short response papers, a take home midterm essay, an ethnographic observation, a group project based in one of the theories of composition we study in class, and a teaching portfolio.

Class participation is also a factor in your grade and will be key for keeping up with the many theories we will be studying.

Required Books:

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader; 3rd Edition – ed. Victor Villanueva

ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-8141-0977-9

Other readings will be available online.

This course provides an introduction to the study of law from linguistic and rhetorical perspectives, with a focus on writing and legal documents. We will 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 will 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.

Recommended preparation

Interest in the law.

Class assignments and grading

Primarily written papers and one presentation.

What do all these items have in common? Swearing or no-swearing at the dinner table, Global English, dueling languages, laws about what can be on signs, interpreters in hospitals, the European Union’s languages, and English as a “neutral"? language? Each item is an example of language policy. This course is an introduction to language policy. We'll examine how language policy works its way into many parts of our daily lives. In addition to reading an overview of the field, we'll read a collection of articles on theoretical approaches to language policy around the world. In addition, we’ll examine how law sometimes sets language policy through a sample of cases from the United States, which can be used as exemplars for law setting language policy in other countries. For the law section, there will be a course packet. There are also two textbooks for the class. Each class member will carry out a research project on a current non-U.S. language policy, reporting to the class and writing a paper on the results of the research

English 481A (concurrent enrollment required in Education 401C) will be taught by English faculty member and Community Literacy Program Director Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill. 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 curriculum, and gives you an
opportunity to work in partnership with community organizations 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 Pre-K and elementary school students,
exploring some central challenges and opportunities for public education (including early childhood education and out-of-school literacy organizations) and using writing and presentation to inquire into, develop
and communicate your thinking about these issues. Writing projects focused on education-related careers and Teacher Education Program applications will be offered in partnership with the UW Career Center and
College of Education. English 481 may be used toward the UW VLPA requirement, and optional W credit is available.

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 programs, all located in the Lake City neighborhood in north
Seattle: Head Start Pre-K at Olympic Hills, Olympic Hills Elementary School and Jackson Park Youth Tutoring Program (afterschool program located at Seattle Housing Authority's Jackson Park community).
Education 401 may be used toward the field work requirement or as an elective in the Education, Learning and Society Minor, and provi! des documentation of school-based experience for application to Teacher
Education programs.

For add codes or with questions: contact instructor Elizabeth Simmons-O'Neill, esoneill@uw.edu

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

URL: davidshields.com

No book orders. Course packet available from Ave Copy. Course packet is Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: An Anthology of Very Brief Prose, lengthy introduction and extensive commentary by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman.

An advanced course in the art of prose. Students will read dozens of very short stories and very brief essays, then write their own versions of these exemplary stories and essays—collages, lovers’ quarrels, “trick stories,” prose-poems, parables, etc.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This honors course focuses upon British literature from 1830-1900. In many ways, these years gave rise to modernity as we
presently experience it, from the first appearance of modern vehicles (including trains, subways, and bicycles) to the first instantaneous electronic communication (the telegraph). These years also witnessed the birth of mass literacy and widespread new discussions of women's rights, worker's rights, children's rights, and animal rights. Not coincidentally, ideas of literary value evolved dramatically during this period: women gained unprecedented positions in the literary world, the
novel first received credit as a legitimate art form, and folk art (from crafts to fairy tales) attained a new cultural value. This course will address both how literature reflects social change and how it helps to create it. Students should look forward to studying a variety of genres: novels, essays, poetry, visual arts. Course expectations will include two short papers and a group presentation.

Learning objectives for this course will include the following:
• close or careful reading of primary textual evidence;
• close or careful reading of critical academic prose;
• ability to summarize the main claims of an academic essay;
• ability to assess and respond to the main claims of an academic essay;
• ability to situate oneself in a critical conversation;
• ability to formulate a distinct critical perspective;
• ability to create a logically coherent and complex thesis;
• ability to develop a coherent and sustained argument to support that thesis

this course will introduce students to important theories of visual culture that may be useful for accounting for the influence of visual technologies in shaping arguments for social change. we will explore the development of criticism of visual technologies initially considered as revolutionary forms of expression that would transform social relations. we will survey important works from the frankfurt school, as well as early semiotic applications, and british cultural studies attempts to bridge frankfurt school neo-marxism and structuralist semiotics, as well as later foucauldian-inflected analyses. we will explore the specific implications of these by considering two specific contexts:: the WPA coverage of poverty and labor, and the abu ghraib photos/videos. all readings will be in a course packet. students are required to sign up to initiate one class discussion; writing a response to reading for a separate day; submitting a proposal/abstract for discussion; and a final 12-15 page essay/critique.

18th- and 19th-century England witnessed the unprecedented popularity of the aesthetics of the sublime (in its two primary incarnations: the Longinian and the Burkean sublime), as well as the emergence of the counter-aesthetics of the picturesque, which introduced the following important changes in sensibility and cultural practices: 1) an investment in the contemplation of landscape as a regular activity, requiring expertise in Italian, Dutch and British landscape painting; 2) a preference for nature in its rough, varied and intricate forms that led to a change in British garden design, from the formal garden to extensive gardens that imitated the look of a wild, uncultivated stretch of land; 3) the preference for Gothic over Greco-Roman architecture and for landscape painting over the traditional genres of historical and portrait painting; and 4) the obsession with ruins and dispossessed people, such as gypsies, beggars and rural workers, who are represented as figures of narcissistic self-sufficiency. In this course we will be especially interested in studying the interaction between the aesthetics of the sublime (with its focus on transcendence, the monumental, the terrifying and the heroic) and the aesthetics of the picturesque (with its preference for aged over young people, and destitutes over heroes). These features of the picturesque are expressive of the fear of monumentality and violence in this period of vast political and social upheaval (The French Revolution) and economic change (the agrarian revolution which changed the face of the English countryside). We will also explore the political implications of various aesthetic theories, wondering for example, why Richard Payne Knight ends a work which promotes the new ethos of the picturesque in landscape gardening with a defense against the charge that his “system of rural embellishment resembles the democratic tyranny of France.”

Readings for the course include selections from treatises on the picturesque (by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight) and on the sublime (Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), as well as representative works by British Romantic writers (Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth). The course will also focus on the study of Dutch, Italian, German and English landscape painters of the 17th- through the 19th-century, as well as the post-modern sublime, as defined by Slavoj Zizek, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Theodor Adorno.

This seminar offers an introduction to bibliographical resources for the study of printing as an art and as a means of textual transmission; a practical view of hand and machine press printing; introductory surveys of analytic and descriptive bibliography, of the history of the book and book production, and of current textual theories; as well as practical experience in editing printed texts.