Jason Morse; ENGL 200 A – Spring '15

“Race, Sex, and the Literary Forms of James Baldwin”

"All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; and
blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex
and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair." -James Baldwin

James Baldwin is one of the most prolific and well respected authors in 20th century American
literature and one of the most prescient theorists of the “noise” of American racial formation, including
the way race stands as the salient social category through which “America” is lived and how sexuality
is the salient way race, through gender, is constituted. Reading his many literary forms – including
novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and essays – this class will look back to Baldwin’s work as a way
to understand our racial present’s contradictions between the continuation of racial violence, including
the epistemic violence of stereotypical representation, and the hegemony of what has come to be called
colorblind, post-racial discourse. We will engage Baldwin’s critique of American racial formation,
including his insightful critiques of white liberalism as well as many anti-racist liberation movements.
Simultaneously, we will engage his understanding of sexuality and gender, including critiques of
homophobia and heteronormativity, theorizations of racialized masculinity and femininity, and queer
of color critique of identity.

To engage Baldwin’s literary theorizations, we will contextualize our reading of his work through a
theoretical framework that engages the intersection of race and sexuality, including the way this
intersection is always gendered. We will read Baldwin’s work in and through our critical essays, not
only applying those concepts to our readings of Baldwin but also applying Baldwin’s literary
theorizations of race and sex to our critical essays. As we look back to Baldwin to understand our
present racial, sexual, and gender formations, we will also situate his work, through historical and
literary critical readings, as part of the time period during which the Jim Crow era elicits many African
American Civil Rights movements. Along with readings theorizing race and sexuality, the stereotype
will be a conceptual path through which we will explore the way social categories define social figures.
We will explore how stereotypes are structures of knowledge that become embedded into social
formations as the salient way of knowing and determining the actions, attitudes, and behaviors of the
figures they represent. This class will also unpack the role of cultural texts like Baldwin’s in
negotiating, reinforcing, and challenging how the cultural representations we call stereotypes define us,
as we also think about how stereotypes mold our very reading process.

To accomplish these reading goals, this class will rely heavily on reading and on participation in whole
class and small group discussions of the critical and cultural texts we read and will require voracious
intellectual curiosity and eager engagement with new ways of thinking we encounter. Coursework will include short presentations, weekly online short comprehension writings, and longer writing
assignments in which you apply the ideas of or critical texts to readings of cultural texts (or vice versa).

Texts may include the novels Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, the
play Blues for Mr. Charlie, selected poetry from Sonny’s Blues and Other Poems, and essays including
The Fire Next Time, “Here Be Dragons,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “The Preservation of
Innocence,” and others along with conceptual framing by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Michel
Foucault, Michael Pickering, Sander Gilman, Angela Davis, and literary criticism on select literary
texts.

ENGL 200 B--Reading Literary Forms: The Victorian Gothic

Since its inception in the mid to late eighteenth century, the Gothic has enjoyed a persistent place in the cultural imagination. As both genre and aesthetic, the category is capacious—often referring to literature, music, fashion, architecture, film, and television (think of all those vampire shows!)—yet, perhaps because of its capaciousness, notoriously difficult to define. This is especially true of the Victorian Gothic, which evokes of a departure from the characteristics typically associated with the “high Gothic” of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In this class, we will interrogate the concept of the Gothic as it is expressed in a variety of literary forms: primarily poetry, short fiction, novels, and film. As we read these exemplary Gothic texts, in conjunction with a selection of secondary critical material, we will attempt to answer questions such as: What is the Gothic? How and why does the Victorian Gothic differ from its predecessor? What are the cultural motives and implications of this departure? Why has the genre been so persistent?

Students will be expected to engage critically with course topics and readings, both in class and, as this class fulfills the “W” requirement, through the composition of academic papers.

This course will examine the idea of “the natural environment” in the late twentieth century, and more specifically, the way literary texts (both fictional and non-fictional) represent human relationships with that environment. More specifically, we will examine some key ways conversations about the environment are moving to cover expanding geographic, cultural, and philosophical terrain. Three or four key ideas will guide the reading we do in this course:

1. What qualifies as natural? To what extent is the idea of “the natural world” socially constructed?
2. With that in mind, how does human presence figure into the natural? How do representations of human inhabitation reflect cultural values and understandings of the environment?
3. How can these discussions take into account the breadth of cultural positions across the planet and the ways in which those cultures do not experience “the global environment” in the same ways?
4. To what extent do humans control their environment? Is that control equally distributed among human beings and cultures?

Course Texts:
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Ernest Hemmingway – The Old Man and the Sea
Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony
Karen Tei Yamashita – Through the Arc of the Rainforest
Course Packet (to be picked up at Ave Copy Center)

"Travel Literature in the High Imperial Era"
Travels always inspire curiosity and fantasy. We never travel to foreign soils only to watch and record things and people in an objective manner but often understand them in our own ways. In other words, we “read” them like literary works whose meaning we interpret, or even distort, from our own subjective, limited perspective. Traveling to foreign lands has always been a rich source of literature and imagination. In turn, travel literature has always triggered people to explore other worlds. Travel literature has provided a number of images and texts from which we have learned of other cultures and civilizations as well as created images, or stereotypes, of them. And we know that those knowledge and stereotypes of other worlds and people often persist to date and frame our view to interpret or even discriminate against them. Oftentimes do we ask: when did all those stereotypical representation of other worlds begin? How those biases of people different from us still play a role in misunderstandings and confrontations between races, countries or civilizations?

In this course, we are not going to attempt to find the “origin” of all the images of other cultures. Probably it is impossible. Instead, we will look at the time period from 1850 to 1950 in which the West’s producing of texts and images of other cultures dramatically accelerated due to technological developments such as the steamship, railroads or photography. As essential part of culture of the time, the texts and images supplemented, justified or sometimes problematized the West’s financial as well as military interventions on foreign soils. We will read literary texts from Britain during the period which center upon the themes of travelling to other worlds. They travel to other worlds for many reasons: exploration of other cultures, hidden treasure, spiritual and physical education, a source of wisdom that could revitalize the West, etc. The questions we will ask include but are not limited to: What are generic features of travel literature and how do those feature change throughout the time period we cover? How does the way they represent other worlds change? What historical, economic and cultural transformations do those changes reflect and respond to? How does their portrayal of other cultures contribute to, or undermine, dominant ideological representations of other cultures and themselves? By attempting to answer these questions to our best ability, we will aim at developing close reading skills, interpreting texts by situating them in their historical and social contexts, articulating our own argument of given texts with proper evidence, growing as a critical thinker and writer, developing important skills and attitude to approach cultures or people different from us, and becoming a better person.
The course satisfies UW’s W (writing) as well as VLPA requirement: students will submit three 4 to 5 page papers with revisions. Other writing assignments include short reading journals and in-class writing activities.

Required Materials:
Ballantyne, Robert Michael (1825–1894): The Coral Island (1858)
ISBN-10: 1611044081
ISBN-13: 978-1611044089

Haggard, Henry Rider (1856 – 1925): King Solomon's Mines (1885)
ISBN-10: 0199536414
ISBN-13: 978-0199536412

Woolf, Virginia (1882 – 1941): The Voyage Out (1915)
ISBN-10: 0199539308
ISBN-13: 978-0199539307

Maugham, W. Somerset (1874 – 1965): The Razor's Edge (1944)
ISBN-10: 9781400034208
ISBN-13: 978-1400034208

Other materials will be made available electronically.

The term “Asian American” is often discussed as if it were both self-evident and immutably fixed. But Asian American writers do not always claim the label for themselves or for their work. Modern critics, too, have struggled to define conceptual similarities in Asian American literature, just as they have struggled to describe the limitations of the concept. Indeed, the question of authenticity or belonging is often raised: who counts? Who doesn’t?

This course asks you to reconsider such static boundaries. This course will introduce you to a cross-section of Asian American poetry and multi-genre work in an attempt to engage the complex socio-historical experience of Asian Americans, up to the present day. We will consider the work in the context in which it was created, examining each poet’s unique sensibilities as well as what is shared across time and space. We will deepen our understanding of Asian American poetry by finding common threads as well as disparate aesthetics. We will close read poems and weave in literary criticism, building an intimate yet contextualized understanding of a work. As writers, readers, and scholars, we will add our own stories and reflect on our process of responding to a text – honoring both self-awareness and engaged conversation. We will be reading texts from Marilyn Chin, Wong May, Theresa Hak Kung Cha, Fred Wah, Truong Tran, Cathy Park Hong, and more.

As part of a “W” credit course, students will be writing and revising two substantial paper assignments. In-class discussions, short response papers, paper proposals, and presentations will provide opportunities with which to develop these two longer papers. Indeed, we will be writing a great deal in this course! We will discover that writing is a process and strong writers practice daily.

Required texts:

* Asian American Poetry: A Course Reader (available at Professional Copy and Print)
* Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009 (from 1982).

Course (212A): Delightful Horror: Gothic Literature from 1700-1900
Description:
This course provides a survey of British literature from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries with a special emphasis on gothic literature. Before audiences went to the movies to delight in the terror of horror films, readers indulged similar impulses when they read gothic literature, a literary form filled with ghosts, monsters, creaking hallways, and mysterious moanings meant to instill fear in its readers. So, one of the questions we will ask throughout this course will be: why is it that we not only choose, but enjoy, being frightened? Further, why is it that this fearful enjoyment provided by the gothic rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, and remained one of the most popular literary forms through the nineteenth century (and beyond)? We will be reading gothic novels, poetry, and critical essays as a means of understanding not only the literature of this period, but also the social, economic, and political forces that shape this time of radical historical changes. Though our reading material comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will think together about how and why the fascination with fear introduced in the gothic is something we still feel today.

This course fulfills the University’s W (writing) requirement, as well as the VPLA (visual, performing, and literary arts) requirement.

Book list:
Walpole, Castle of Otranto
Lewis, The Monk
Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
Shelley, Frankenstein
Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

POLITICS AND PLAY

Shakespeare was not only a prolific poet and dramatist, he was also a historian of sorts; keenly aware of the politics of his own day and the monarchy’s turbulent past. His history plays, often overlooked in favor of his more gripping comedies and tragedies, provide a window into some of the most pressing concerns of Elizabethan England: What are the characteristics of a good ruler? What makes a tyrant? How should political succession be determined? When is rebellion justified? Furthermore, the history plays, lacking the concrete textual conventions that define the comedies and tragedies, prompt readers to consider how history operates as genre, the function of the play as such, and the complex textual history of Shakespeare’s work. This course investigates one of Shakespeare’s greatest story arcs the Henriad, covering 17 years of English history (1398-1415) and three kings (Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V), which will allow us to examine these issues within a tight regnal narrative of upheavals, interpersonal tensions, and precarious peacetimes.

As a W credit course, we will also be using the four plays of the Henriad as the foundation for practicing writing skills important not only to literary studies, but more broadly to the analytical and critical thinking required of you in your other classes at UW. Students will complete several reading responses, 3 short papers (1000-1500 words), and a final portfolio project (1000 words). Additionally students should expect to actively participate in class activities, including lectures, in-class writing, group work, and discussions.

Required Course Texts: We will be using the Folger Shakespeare Library editions of the following plays
• Richard II: ISBN 978-0743484916
• Henry IV, Part 1: ISBN 978-0743485043
• Henry IV, Part 2: ISBN 978-0743485050
• Henry V: ISBN 978-0743484879

Texts:

Spring Quarter

Engl 242A: Novellas of the 19th Century U.S.—Modernity, Compulsion, Revolution

Instructor: Bob Hodges

Course description: Texts for the course consist largely of novellas, but short stories, theoretical and historical writing, & literary criticism will also be assigned.

The course provides students with three different keywords, pilfered and modified from Jennifer Fleissner’s work, to approach reading in the U.S. long 19th century: 1) modernity (whether in economic relations, social rôles, or the psyche) 2) compulsion (whether as physical coercion or unconscious drive) 3) revolution (whether as direct uprising or a broader sense of “the world turned upside down”). The concepts will be developed through short excerpts from the historical work of Marshall Berman, Walter Johnson, Greg Grandin, and Karen Halttunen.

The course’s short (and cheap) novellas span multiple categories: Afro-American, detective, highly-crafted realist, historical, horror, regionalist, social protest, travel, utopian, women’s, and science fictions. These novellas’ global reach in settings ranges from the peripheries of the U.S. to Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the polar regions.

The course satisfies UW’s W (writing) requirement: during the quarter students will submit three 3-4 page papers with some option for revision. Other assignments include short in-class and homework writing assignments as well as a group presentation. The course also satisfies the VPLA (visual, performing, and literary arts) requirement and the pre-1900 requirement for English majors.

Required texts: Course packet (at Ram’s Copy Center)
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (Dover)
Herman Melville Bartleby & Benito Cereno (Dover)
R. H. Davis, C. P. Gilman, S. O. Jewett, & E. Wharton 4 Stories by American Women (Penguin)
Henry James Daisy Miller (Dover)
Edward Bellamy Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Dover)
Mark Twain Pudd'nhead Wilson (Dover)
Sutton E. Griggs Imperium in Imperio (Modern Library)
Pauline E. Hopkins Of One Blood (Givens Collection)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland (Dover)
H. P. Lovecraft At the Mountains of Madness (Modern Library)

ENGL 242: Reading Prose Fiction: Fables of Globalization
We have come to imagine the entire world as a stage for narrative action. From blockbuster films to social media, popular music to political crises, the entire planet is more than ever the backdrop for individual stories and experiences. While this is now a cliché of our globalized world, it is an even older cliché for writers who emerged from the colonial and/or post-colonial world. This includes immigrants, refugees and exiles but also those rooted in one place but who then insist that the rest of the world acknowledge that place as symbolic of everywhere else. In this class we will read works that deliberately stage and engage the problems and experiences of a globalized world in their fictions.

Spring Quarter 2015

English 242 C "(re)Making the American Family"

Instructor: R. Allen Baros

This course will interrogate the cultural and political constructions of the American family through literature and cultural production. The role of family has been an ever revered and sometimes questioned concept in American politics and culture. Often used as a basis for organizing economic systems, it has also often been used as a marker of cultural, political, and ethical normativity as it organizes gender, sexuality, and class into formations of power and privilege. Long before and after the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, normativity of family often took on the role of a specter, rising up to haunt racialized and non-normative families and their members, reminding them of the distance between themselves and the normative American ideal, or what Audre Lorde calls the “mythical norm.” The figure of family was significant through the Civil Rights movements, leading to ongoing debates about the form and function of the concept. Text for this course will span from the just prior to the period known as the Civil Rights era and move toward our contemporary cultural moment. In order to provide a discussion of family formations and politics unique to the United States and the 20th through 21st century we will largely discuss texts in which race, gender, sexuality, and family all intersect.

Primary texts will include: (later texts subject to change)

Pocho by José Antonio Villarreal
No No Boy by John Okada.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Rain God by Arturo Islas
We the Animals by Justin Torres
Additional readings via course reader

English 242 D: 20th Century American Women Writers
Instructor: Rachel Graf
Website: https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/965004

The choice to organize works of literature by the gender of their author - be it in the form of an anthology, a university course, or a Wikipedia page* - is rightly a controversial one. Despite the goal of bringing attention to writers who might otherwise be excluded solely on the basis of their gender, "women writers" collections risk essentializing certain themes, characters and narrative structures as feminine.

In this course we will unpack our assumptions of women's literature. We will explore issues of audience, subjectivity and representativeness. You'll notice that the titles of each of the course novels suggest the traditionally feminine sphere of homes and family. This will be our starting point: what is the domain of American women in the past century? Can women writers gain equal recognition to their male counterparts with or without invoking gender?

Course texts:
Edith Wharton - House of Mirth
Willa Cather - The Professor's House
Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping
Octavia Butler - Kindred
Additional Readings via coursepacket

*http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/wikipedia_moves_women_to_american_women_novelists_category_leaves_men_in_american_novelists/

English 242E "Noir by Noirs": Black Pulp Fiction
Kirin Wachter-Grene

This class is a comparative study in genre fiction. We will read noir, hardboiled, and other pulp fiction written by African American, African, Caribbean, and Black British writers from the 1950s-today. This class counts for "W" credit, and will require students to write two 5-7 page revisable papers. Students can also expect to write semi-formal reading responses and to participate in a group project.
**Please note that students are expected to keep up with the weekly reading and are expected to come to class prepared to discuss and engage with the texts**

Required Texts:
Course Reader (Available at Ave Copy the first week of class)
Himes, Chester A Rage in Harlem ISBN: 978-0679720409
Mosely, Walter Devil in a Blue Dress ISBN: 978-0743451796
Phillips, Gary Violent Spring ISBN: 978-0425156254
Ngugi, Mukoma Wa Nairobi Heat ISBN: 978-1935554646

(Please note: All books are available at the UW bookstore. Please purchase the required edition)

Margins and Centers: who's in, who's out, and why that matters for all of us”
This class focuses on literature that will help us think about how people categorize each other on the basis of various social and biological features, including gender, race, ethnicity, language, citizenship status, sexuality, and ability. In all societies around the globe, some are part of the Center--often with status and the power to make and enforce rules--and some are relegated to the Margin--often with less power and subject to the rules and regulations that the Center dictates. These dynamics play out in terms of international relations between countries on the world stage, as well as in our own seemingly smaller lives with family and friends. What's going on? Why does this keep happening? And what does this have to do with you and me? The novels we read this term will help us imagine people who might seem different from us, and provoke us to ask larger questions about identity, power, privilege, society and the role of culture in our lives.

Spring Quarter 2015

English 242 G: Questioning American Multiculturalism and Multiracialism

Instructor: Leanne Day

This class will analyze and grapple with understanding race (in particular mixed race), gender, sexuality, class, and identity in America and what we consider American literature. In thinking through questions of immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, we will discuss how authors imagine and narrate American identity. Some of the questions we will engage with over the quarter are: What constitutes the body of fiction that we identify as organizing and defining American? How do we consider and contest the ways in which literature operates? How does fiction meditate on the boundaries of culture? Over the quarter, we will be reading novels and short stories that focus on how fiction opens up possibilities of imagination that not only reflect social and cultural history, but also consider alternatives to our realities. How do the varying texts individually and collectively resist and reinforces assumptions about America? How does a post 9/11 moment along with an Obama presidency contribute to, complicate, and develop the complexities of understanding ideas of multiculturalism and multiracialism?

We will read a broad range of contemporary fiction as well as some general theoretical texts, most of which will be included in the Course Reader. Other texts will include novels such as:
Celeste Ng’s 2014 Everything I Never Told You (ISBN-10: 159420571X; ISBN-13: 978-1594205712),
Junot Diaz’s 2013 This is How You Lose Her (ISBN-10: 1594631778; ISBN-13: 978-1594631771), and
Paul Beatty’s 1996 White Boy Shuffle (ISBN-10: 031228019X, ISBN-13: 978-0312280192).

Other readings may include in whole or part: Kate Chopin, James Baldwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Octavia Butler, and Danzy Senna.

Students should expect to actively participate in class activities, including lectures, group presentations, group work, online posts, and discussions. It is crucial to bring an open-minded, curious, and respectful attitude to this class in order to foster engaging and productive discussion.

This class counts for a "W" writing credit, and will require students to write shorter papers (3-4 pages each) and a final paper (6-9 pages). Students can also expect to write semi-formal reading responses throughout the quarter.

*Books will be available at the bookstore, but I encourage you to check online or half price books as well.
*Course pack will be available from Ave Copy

The course, taught annually, examines the works of Vladimir Nabokov, from his early novels written in Europe to his later
masterpieces, including Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, and Ada. By popular demands I will be teaching Nabokov and Joyce this Spring (VN: Stories, Poetry, The Gift, Lolita; JJ: Dubliners, Poetry, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses) but the focus will still be more on Nabokov than on Joyce, whose two novels we will not read in full, unlike Nabokov's.

We will read and discuss four novels and a wide assortment of short stories written by American authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will be expected to keep up with a reading schedule, attend class regularly, take part in class-discussion, and write a series of in-class essays in answer to study questions handed out in advance.

Required texts: Wallace and Mary Stegner, eds., GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES; Milton Crane, ed., FIFTY GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES; Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES; John Steinbeck, EAST OF EDEN; James Baldwin, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN; and Anne Tyler, A PATCHWORK PLANET

Catalog Description: Introduction to the methods and theories used in the analysis of American culture. Emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature, including history, politics, anthropology, and mass media.

This course focuses on the uses of the English language in creating, maintaining, and challenging borders found in a wide-range of contexts from popular media to language-learning classrooms. By introducing students to theoretical concepts and methodological tools necessary when discussing borders, we will work together not only to understand how borders are articulated in our increasingly multicultural and globalized world, but also to develop unique ways to challenge and/or cross those very borders that may limit and/or hinder us.

Our canvas page will be updated and published the week before classes start.

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

English 283: Beginning Verse Writing
Spring 2015

This course will serve as an introductory writing “workshop.” Students will closely read and constructively critique each other’s work. The workshops are designed to offer possible pathways and methods for revision, as students will build toward creating a final portfolio of poems by the end of the term. Though the class will likely push you outside your comfort zone at times, workshop should always serve as a supportive community of fellow writers. You will receive ample feedback on your work from both peers and the instructor. Through practice, students will learn to be smarter readers, who notice not just the problems with a draft but also the possibilities it presents.

The course will also involve a substantial amount of reading (and discussion of that reading). The readings are designed to help you establish a relationship between your writing and literary tradition. You will be exposed to a wide variety of poetry, from classical to contemporary selections, in order to help you find out where your affinities lie and to help you draw on various models in your own work.

Much of the course will be organized around Gregory Orr’s “Four Poetic Temperaments”—story, structure, music and imagination. We will use these categories in order to build on existing strengths and improve weaknesses. Students should emerge from the course with a clearer sense of their own voice, the kinds of poems that interest them, and some ideas for how to move forward as poets.

Disclaimer: This class is not an easy A. The readings are difficult, the pace of the class is rigorous, and (as you will no doubt find out) writing poetry is hard!

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

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

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified 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 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.

English 301: Introduction to the study of English Language and Literature

Why study English? Why study literature? Are literary power or poetic
beauty truly accessible to analysis? Does impassioned rhetoric move us
because of its passion or because of its rhetoric? And whatever can it
mean that various books or poems or writers are so often called great?
Great for what, exactly?

This course is a "gateway" introduction to the English major. You need
to take it if you are to be an English major (though you may also take
it without any such intentions). It is designed to introduce students to
the historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literature and
literary study. Among other things, it will entail the reading and
discussion of poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction. And it will
introduce students to the kinds of debates that surrounded the creation
of the first English departments in the nineteenth century, when the
serious academic study of anglophone literature began. It cannot
introduce you to every aspect of the English major (e.g., we will
probably do no creative writing), but it will leave you with a broad
sense of the field, with some grasp of major critical vantages like
historicism and feminist theory, and with real training in the
bread-and-butter parts of the discipline: genre analysis and explication
de texte, or close reading. In it, I promise at least a little
impassioned rhetoric and a lot of great reading.

The course requires concurrent enrollment in English 297.

This course is designed to tackle the two main complaints about theory: one, that it is alienatingly abstract; and two, that theory doesn?t make sense once you try to explain it to people outside the English major. How to make theory an extension of self-making, and remove it from the role of merciless taskmaster? How do theoretical ideas change when explored through the vernacular?

The general theme for the quarter circles around the issue of pain, which is so viscerally real and rooted in the body that it seems to be the antithesis of intangible and cerebral theory. Selected texts by Stephen Greenblatt, Elaine Scarry, Eric Hayot, and novelist Elizabeth Nunez examine how bodily feeling translates into the impulse to narrate, and then how these narrations create cultural systems of feeling that regulate the distribution of who is recognized as fully human. The small number of texts for this quarter means that we will have the luxury of time to think about form and motivation, as well as content. Each of the authors selected are not only pondering similar philosophical questions, but (at least to my mind) do better than most in using different approaches to communicate ideas with clarity. We will be doing a lot of exploratory writing this quarter to give you practice in working theoretical language into a grammar and syntax that makes sense to you, and t!
o understand the relationship between self and critical practice.

Please note: no addcodes are available before the first week of the class.

Theories of Narrative
In this class we will consider a range of critical perspectives on narrative. In addition to applying critical theories to a diverse selection of literary texts, we will endeavor to understand these literary texts as potentially offering theories of narrative of their own. The class will concentrate on three novels: Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water, and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. We'll also test out critical readings on narrative excerpts dating from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.

Critics and narrative theorists may include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, M. M. Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukacs, F. K. Stanzel, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Wayne Booth, Susan Sontag, Robyn Warhol, Martha Nussbaum, Homi Bhabha, Monika Fludernik, and Rita Felski.

Assessment will be based on an annotated bibliography and three short papers, one of which will be revised into a final 6–10 page essay.

Catalog Description: Overview of Cultural Studies with a focus on reading texts or objects using cultural studies methods and writing analytic essays using cultural studies methods. Focuses on culture as a site of political and social debate and struggle.

This course aims to familiarize you with the development of a story of love and betrayal, involving Troilus and Cressida, which was told by major writers (e.g., Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare) in the later medieval and early modern period, against the background of the ancient siege of Troy. To set the stage for this later story, the course will examine a number of stories involving love and Troy found in important ancient classics, such as Homer’s Iliad, its sequel in Vergil’s Aeneid, and selected love letters in Ovid’s Heroides. We will then look at the evolution of the story of Troilus in medieval writers (e.g., Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s twelfth-century French verse Romance of Troy, and Guido delle Colonne’s Latin prose History of the Destruction of Troy (1287) that culminates in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (ca. 1336-68) and its successor, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385-86). After reading the Scottish Testament of Cresseid, by Robert Henryson (1475), we will conclude the course with Shakespeare’s 1601-02 play Troilus and Cressida.

Reading List:

Homer, The Iliad
Vergil, Aeneid (elections)
Ovid, Heroides (selections)
Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Romance of Troy (selections)
Guido delle Colonne, History of the Destruction of Troy (selections)
Boccaccio, Il Filostrato
Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
Henryson, Testament of Cresseid
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.

Catalog Description: Literary, intellectual, and historical ferment of the period from the French Revolution to the 1830s. Readings from major authors in different literary forms; discussions of critical and philosophical issues in a time of change.

English 345
Adaptation: From Literature to Film

The term “adaptation” describes the translation of a text from one form into another. For some readers, texts lose much in the transition, with adaptations failing to equal their sources’ quality. However, in a Darwinian sense, adaptation allows organisms to endure environmental shifts. This alternate view suggests that, in the words of Robert Stam, adaptations “help their source[s] . . . ‘survive’ . . . changing environments and changing tastes . . .” (3). This class examines the theory and practice of cinematic adaptation. Our investigation will move beyond limited comparisons of “good” originals and “bad adaptations.” Instead, we will focus on the dialogue between multiple versions of the same story, asking how and why film adaptations modify their sources in a particular manner.

To do so, we will examine adaptations from around the globe, beginning with multiple versions of Hamlet, Frankenstein, and Batman, among other texts, and concluding with films from the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival. The first seven weeks of the course will take place on campus; the final three weeks will blend online and face-to-face instruction to accommodate SIFF screening times.

ENGL 347A:
The Fire This Time: Contemporary Black Non-Fiction
When many of our cultural, political and economic crises center on or attempt to evade issues of race, black writers have been central to articulating the zeitgeist. And in such times many of them favor non-fiction as a method of either directly approaching “truth” or of dissecting it in order to explore exactly how it functions, for whom and to what ends. This class focuses on a series of important works of non-fiction by black writers who engage our contemporary “crises” from multiple perspectives. Ranging from memoir to reportage, criticism to political punditry, these works not only demonstrate the range of possibilities available in non-fiction but also provide an ongoing narrative of our changing racial realities and our rapidly transforming notions of “the real.”

Catalog Description: Creative writings -- novels, short stories, poems -- of contemporary Indian authors; traditions out of which they evolved. Differences between Indian writers and writers of the dominant European/American mainstream.

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

As a field, Rhetoric is concerned with the myriad of competing arguments
in the world and how those arguments create persuasive impact. How does a
speech become iconic and influence an entire generation's actions? How does
a 5 second meme go viral? How does a controversial legal case create
ripples of impact into individuals? personal lives? In other words, how do
the textual and the material intersect?

In Research in Language and Rhetoric, we will explore several methods of
investigating rhetorical issues. Considering texts that are written and
spoken, contemporary and historical, we will develop frameworks for
analyzing texts and carrying that analysis into longer-term projects.
Conducting rhetorical research will also give us insight into how beliefs
and knowledge are constructed and shaped in a variety of disciplines and
genres. Students are encouraged to consider how these processes supplement
their individual research interests.

As we work through different methodological perspectives, students are
encouraged to weigh the strengths and weaknesses they see in each approach
and brainstorm potential ways of dealing with each. We will also consider
the ethics of ?on the ground? research and how this intersects with one's
writing choices.

Homework will include short weekly writing responses and exercises,
practice with the various research methods, a group presentation, and a
final portfolio. Methods may include rhetorical analysis, discourse
analysis, in-person interviews, surveys, and participant observation.

What are folktales, fairytales, myths, legends and contemporary "urban legends?" This course looks at the oral art of Russian folktale, its roots in pre-Christian religion, its worldwide connections, and its manifestations and transformations in modern Russian literature and culture. No prerequisites and no knowledge of Russian required.

Time: Monday and Wednesday 2:30-4:20 pm
Course Location: Gould 435
Instructor: Ms. Veronica Muskheli
Office hours: Monday 12 noon-1 pm; Thursday 2:30-4:00 pm and by appointment
Email: nika@uw.edu

Assigned Readings: Due on the date for which it is listed
Weekly Responses: Hard copy one-page double-spaced 12 point Times Roman, due on Monday at 2:30 pm; for full credit, 5 out of 8 possible response papers have to be submitted (7 out of 8 for students seeking Writing Credit)
Final Paper: Hard copy, 5-6 pages (12-page paper for Writing Credit), double-spaced 12 point Times Roman, due on Tuesday, June 9, by 4:30 pm (accepted by the instructor in person in Gould 435 between 2:30 and 4:30 pm)
Extra Credit: Telling your tale and/or Attending and reviewing a traditional storytelling session at the Folklife Festival (May 22-25, 2015) in Seattle Center

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft verse. Readings in contemporary verse and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

ENGL 384 B:
This class will focus on the craft of fiction and/or creative non-fiction. As part of that study students will work on character driven stories, which simply means characters drive action in a well-written story rather than the opposite. In addition, students will study the structure and development of the three-act story. The responsibility for the success of this class is based on the writing students produce for the class and the critique of the writing done by their classmates.

The goal of the class is to prepare students for more independent writing, self-critique, and more advanced levels of fiction writing. The focus on the writing is centered more on revision and understanding craft than producing “publishable” fiction.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

English 440A. Special Studies in Literature.
‘The Imperial Romance’.

This class examines the enduring popular genre of the imperial romance, which stretches from the 19th century to the present day (as seen in the Indiana Jones film franchise). The genre harnesses the romance mode-- including a regenerative quest, marvelous episodes, coincidences, hazardous landscape, limited characterisation, and heroic triumph over a series of increasingly difficult challenges--to the project of empire building. We explore its roots in the British Empire, where it generated British chivalric heroes, magnificent African warriors, faithful African servants, demonic African ‘witchdoctors’, big game hunting, hidden treasure and ancient civilizations. Despite its structural ideological conservatism, the imperial romance has proved attractive to African American and African writers. We look at the ways in which the genre has been adopted and adapted by black writers to advance ideas of racial liberation and self-determination.

Primary texts may include H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines; Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood; Solomon T. Plaatje’s Mhudi.

Spring 2015
English 444
W.R. Streitberger
Tragicomedy from The Winter’s Tale to Breaking Bad

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.’ Samuel Beckett, Endgame

While comic treatment of potentially tragic experience is as old as Euripides’ ironic tragedies with comic endings and as new as some of the latest Hollywood films, tragicomedy has predominated mainly in two periods--the Renaissance and the modern era. The theoretical conceptions and critical concerns common to both periods are that tragicomedy is a quintessentially ‘modern’ genre, that it is more true to life than either tragedy or comedy, that the relationship between the comic and tragic must not be haphazard but rather the one should modify the other to bring a meaningful mixture of responses from the audience, and finally that success in this genre is difficult to achieve. We will read plays and theoretical discussions of the genre from the Renaissance and modern periods and see film productions of some of the plays before going on to investigate the genre in contemporary films and television. Reports, essays, in class exam.

English 452: “When the Page Floats Transformed”: Reading Literary Adaptations
Spring 2015
E. L. George

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 that have been adapted into film. Short examples include Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over The Mountain”; Andre Dubus, “Killings”; Longer examples include Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Required critical reading includes Richard Barsam’s critical text Looking at Movies, whick will begin the course. We will also be accessing many scholarly as well as popular book and film reviews from our UW library databases.

Course requirements include reading and interpreting print and film narratives from various perspectives; engaged, in-person attendance and active participation in full class sessions, including in-class screenings of films and small-group presentations of film techniques and critiques of fiction and film; critical and persuasive analyses in spoken and written formats using a variety of critical approaches; research and evaluation of story and film reviews; a final essay examination, and a midterm.

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

This course examines concepts such as language death and language birth, the relationship between dialect and language. Notions of language politics, language standardization, and language codification are considered. No Prior knowledge of the language(s) necessary since most readings are general and students may work on language(s) of their choice.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Maya Sonenberg
ENGL 484A: Advanced Prose Workshop
Spring 2015

Course Description

This advanced prose writing class focus on workshopping your short stories or literary essays. You may write either fiction or creative nonfiction for this class, but be prepared to write two stories or essays (10-15 pages each), revise one of them, and do a presentation on a short story or essay that you love. You will also be expected to write comments on your classmates’ work and to participate deeply in every class discussion.
I will expect you to arrive in class the first day with a story or essay well underway.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

ENGL 487:
This is a screenwriting class, which means that the bulk of the responsibility for the success of this class is based on the writing students produce for the class and their critique of the writing done by your classmates.

The goal of the class is to prepare students for more independent writing and self-critique. The focus on the writing is centered on revision, editing, adaptation of an existing fictional story and understanding the craft of the screenplay.

The course is divided into four major areas: Story, Character, Dialogue and Structure.

In English 491B (C/NC; 1-3 credits) you put what you learn on campus into action, volunteering (4-5 hours a week, on a schedule you arrange) at one of our partner public schools. English 491B will appear on your transcript as an internship. English 491 may be used toward the field work requirement or as an elective in the Education, Learning and Society Minor, and provides documentation of school-based experience needed for application to Teacher Education programs.

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

Catalog Description: Individual study (reading, papers) by arrangement with the instructor. Required of, and limited to, honors seniors in English.

Catalog Description: Individual study (reading, papers) by arrangement with the instructor. Required of, and limited to, honors seniors in English.

In English 498A students will meet twice weekly on campus (MW 10:30-12:20) in a writing-intensive capstone seminar focused on learning effective methods of working with public school students, exploring some central challenges and opportunities for public education, and using writing and presentation to inquire into, develop and communicate your thinking about these issues. English 498A includes research instruction and revision conferences with the instructor.

English 498A + English 491B = a capstone service-learning seminar for English majors taught by English Department faculty member and Community Literacy Program Director Elizabeth Simmons-O?Neill. This linked pair of courses offers an opportunity for English Majors interested in public education to gain crucial school-based experience, serves as a bridge between undergraduate and Teacher Education Program curriculum (including work with College of Education faculty) and gives English Majors an opportunity to work in partnership with public school students and teachers as you complete your undergraduate degree.

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