This course is the third in a sequence of courses addressing the history of criticism and theory. This course will begin with Kant and end with the American New Criticism and Structuralism. The course will place questions of literary theory, aesthetics, and the practice of criticism in a philosophical context. Members of the seminar will be responsible for one in-class presentation (in the form of a two or three day in-class symposium), and a final paper.

     Texts:  Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (rev. edition);  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (trans. Bernard);  F.W.J. Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory (trans. T. Pfau);  I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism; Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn;  Victor Ehrmann, Structuralism.

     There will also be a small course reader, with texts by Coleridge, Charles Sanders Peirce, and a selection of essays on Russian formalism, structuralism, and linguistics.

      During the years 1933-1939, the French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve gave a series of lectures on Hegel that were to exert a deep influence on the French intellectual elite of the time.  Although Kojeve's anthropological interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit has often been decried (especially by Jacques Derrida), it can be argued that it provides the philosophical key to modern French thought.  This course will put special emphasis on Kojeve's influence on Sartre (the "for-itself" and the "in-itself"), Bataille ("sovereignty" and "useless negativity"), Blanchot (literature and death), Lacan (the "desire of the desire of the Other") and Girard ("mimetic desire").  -- The following texts will be read and discussed in class: Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel ; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness ; Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel ; Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice" and "Letter to X, lecturer on Hegel"; Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to death" ; selections from Jacques Lacan's writings; Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man".  -- Students will be asked to write a substantial paper at the end of the quarter.

      Required texts: Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980); Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1966); Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). -- The other texts will be photocopied.

      Although all non-English texts will be accompanied by modern English translations, the seminar will provide the basic skills necessary to read Old Irish and Old Norse literature in the original languages.  Addressing neglected "unofficial" and extracanonical literature of the early Middle Ages, readings for the seminar will accommodate suggestions of participants.  Suggestions to date have included Otherworld narratives in Celtic and Scandinavian traditions; female visionary literature, including the Old Icelandic "Vision of the Sibyl"; saints' legends reflecting various issues of gender and power; curses and execration-tablets; archaic medical and legal texts; vernacular treatments of biblical and liturgical texts; and anagrams, ciphers, and artificial languages (including pseudo-Hebrew and pseudo-Greek). 

      Apart from the Irish Tain and the Old Norse poetic Edda, all texts will be supplied in class by the instructor.  Each participant will undertake an individualized course of research, leading to the production of a final paper. 

      Recent work on early modern nationhood has problematized the notion of "English" history by introducing an awareness of other histories of the British Isles, and articulating the complex dynamics involved in the creation of "Great Britain" as an expanding commercial empire.  This course will focus on Shakespeare, with some consideration of his contemporaries, to address the following issues: the representation of Roman, medieval and Tudor Britain; the Irish crisis; the vernacular and education; the representation of others; imperialism, absolutism, and the discourses of authority.  In addition to Shakespeare, authors will include Marlowe, Spenser, and Heywood.

     A seminar reading of two great novelists of the English eighteenth century, with reference to both period and latter-day ideas about the novel.  The vivid and powerful books of realistic fictional "histories" Richardson and Fielding produced between 1740 and 1750 made those years the most brilliant and decisive decade in the history of the English novel.  (Some might argue for the 1840's, but not me.  ) All this began with Richardson's strangely ridiculous, strangely compelling story of Pamela, which in turn called forth Fielding's rude burlesque Shamela and then Joseph Andrews ("a lewd and ungenerous engraftment" on Pamela, according to the author of -- Pamela).  The same pattern of collaborative antagonism and rivalry reappeared in 1747 with Clarissa, followed in 1749 by Tom Jones.  And there is our reading, but it won't all get treated equally.  Joseph Andrews and Clarissa will be the starring works -- Joseph Andrews in that role rather than the more usual Tom Jones because I think it is a greater work in some ways, less imposing and artfully finished but wilder and more spirited, with one classic creative achievement (Parson Adams) of Cervantean vitality.  So we will go more slowly and closely in our reading of those two texts, faster and more neglectingly (might as well say it) with the other two, since we just can't do everything in ten weeks.  Even at that, a lot of pages to read (1499 of them from the amazing Clarissa, but a weirdly absorbing experience once you surrender to it, like being abducted by aliens).  We will give due consideration also to the critical topic of the so-called rise of the novel, as it was understood during the eighteenth century itself, developed through the nineteenth century, and stands now in contemporary scholarship.  Some topics of emphasis from the social and cultural period history will be sex, marriage, class relations, and law.  Please feel free to get in touch with me for more information (543-2636 or tlock@uwashington.edu). 

      This course has two aims.  We shall survey the literature of the Regency period in England, a notably “hot” period that includes (among other items) the later novels of Austen and the works of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.  (Technically, the Regency runs from 1811-1820, but in fact we’ll move further into the ‘20s—as a convenience, and as a modest experiment with literary/historical borders.)  At the same time, we shall examine the theoretical bases and practical consequences of the historicist impulse that has driven Romantic studies since the early 1980s.  Topics to be investigated include the relationship of literature to "current events," the historicizing and gendering of taste, the response of Regency writers to contemporary audiences (and vice-versa), and, more broadly, the idea of “literary period” itself.  There are no prerequisites for this class, but students should recognize that an extensive (and ongoing) synthesis of historical, theoretical, and primary materials will be required. 

      Required texts: Hemans, Records of Woman, with Other Poems; Lamb, Glenarvon; Austen, Mansfield Park; McGann, ed.  The Oxford Authors: Byron; Stillinger, ed.  John Keats: Complete Poems; Reiman and Powers, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. 

     Whatever skills and knowledge undergraduates may bring to a course in the literature of a distant time and place, they may be daunted both by the texts themselves and the contexts.  However critically and theoretically sophisticated, they may knowingly or unknowingly be caught somewhere between their early 21st century values, tastes, perspectives and those of the material they are asked to study.  Literally, this can be regarded as a problem of seeing where they are.  The problem is complicated when pictures and picturing become both subjects and styles of literary representation.  Often these texts spawned adaptations (stage, painting, other media) in their own and in later times.  Through reading and discussion focused on such dynamics as the relationship of the original texts and illustrations of a Dickens novel to subsequent illustrations and stage and film adaptation students can engage with expanding temporal and disciplinary contexts.  Although textual adaptations and appropriations achieve measures of independence as cultural documents, they continue to enrich their originals in ways that may lead students to (or back to) texts that in themselves may have seemed obscure, abstract, inaccessible (as many undergraduates seem to find, say, the novels of Jane Austen).

     This seminar does not presuppose any special knowledge of the texts and period; in fact, graduate students lacking extensive acquaintance may model the sort of learning that the teaching emphasis of this seminar is proposing.  Topics and texts for this seminar will expand or vary according to the interests and the number of students enrolling--at the least they will include Austen, her contemporary 19th century reception reconsidered in view of 20th century film; Dickens staging and on stage (A Christmas Carol and possibly A Tale of Two Cities); 19th Century Woman as Subject/Subjected (Jane Eyre, selected poetry of Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Rosetti in connection with a number of illustrations and paintings).

     Graduate students at any point in their studies are welcome from English (including MFA and Textual Studies), Comparative Literature, and Art History. 

      We will survey some of the positions in the current debate over cosmopoliatnism (and its correlate universalism) as it returns to contemporqary discourse after several decades under house arrest during the reign of multiculturalism.  The opportunities and problems--philosophical, professional, historical, political--of the return of the cosmopolitan will concern us for several weeks before we turn to particular enactments of the cosmopolitan as a guiding ideal (and compromised reality) in works by Du Bois, Richard Wright, Samuel Delany and others.

     In this course we will consider the relation of art and culture to notions of justice in pragmatism.  We will start with Peirce, James, and Dewey and move forward to the recent revival of pragmatism in such figures as Rorty, Putnam, and Posner.  Students will give oral reports about collateral texts and there will be a paper.

     This course will investigate three significant sites of erotic poetic exposition: 1) the chivalric love traditions as they emerge in Provencal and are developed in Petrarch and Shakespeare 2) the response to these traditions by Ezra Pound in forming his modernist poetics and the subsequent answering poetries of H. D.  and Robert Duncan 3)the Robert Duncan-Jack Spicer (dis)connection in San Francisco and the emergence of select Bay Area innovative erotic poetries, including Leslie Scalapino and Kathleen Fraser.  The course will explore diverse critical approaches that address the poetics of love-writing, especially in relation to gender; collaborative and antagonistic dynamics as they emerge in lived relationships and through textual erotics; and select queer and erotic theories.  Campus visits in May by Barrett Watten and Rachel DuPlessis who will address the subject of "love in poetry" will provide an exciting dimension to the course. 

     This course will discuss the poetry of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize Winner Seamus Heaney.  We will trace the development of one the most important poets writing in English from his early beginnings (Death of a Naturalist, 1966) to his latest collection of poems (The Spirit Level, 1996), against the backdrop of twentieth century Irish poetry and in the context of recent debates about the state of contemporary British poetry.

     Text (required): Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1999 (Pap); ISBN 0374526788 (also available as hardcover edition).

     Requirements: Regular attendance and ongoing seminar discussions (10%);  2 presentations (introductions to poems) (15%);  one short paper (3-5 pages: report on research) (25%);  one longer paper (8-10 pages: a critical study of several poems) (50%).

      After years of scholarship in twentieth-century studies featuring "waning of affect" (in Jameson's famous phrase about postmodernism), study of emotion, affect, and "feelings" in modern and contemporary literary and cultural texts is now, again, a topic of theoretical and critical attention, with a growing number of conferences, fellowships, books, and journal articles devoted to it.  This course will read fiction, theory, interdisciplinary discourses, and popular culture texts to think about contemporary uses of emotion. 

      Since emotions have histories, and since various nations, classes, ethnicities, cultures, genders, and sexualities produce their own versions of what matters in emotional life, students will be free to select a specific emotion/affect/site/visual or verbal text on which to write, and to situate this writing in a historical moment and particular culture of their choice. 

      We will begin with readings stressing the cultural construction of emotion, then take up a variety of discourses (popular, literary, psychological, philosophical) to see how the study of one emotional nexus demands considering the role of the social in the production of individual subjects.  The example for these readings will be shame and its related affects--guilt, shyness, embarrassment.  What arguments separate these terms, why does it matter, and for whom?  What is the discursive function of such constructions as "shame cultures vs guilt cultures," "toxic shame," or "white liberal guilt"? 

      From there we'll move to recent readings of some classic texts on emotion, to considerations of readerly affect, and finally to the novel as a site for theorizing emotion.  Texts for the course will include fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alice Walker, and Djuna Barnes; and essays by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Raymond Williams, Rita Felski, and Silvan Tomkins, among others. 

      Legal language and discourse has been disparaged for at least a thousand years. Complaints abound from those forced to engage with the legal system. But what is it and why does it function as it does? This course will address both the applied discourse analysis of legal language and the theoretical discussions on the nature, purpose, and politics of this professional language. We'll begin with some of those theoretical discussions-from social theorists such as Habermas and Teubner, and from critical legal studies scholar Peter Goodrich, and we'll also contrast positions within the field, such as Peter Tiersma, who argues that there is little to distinguish legal language from other professional languages, and my own work, drawing on Foucault, arguing that there are considerable differences. On the practical side, we'll be analyzing legal discourse-contracts, confessions, jury instructions, family law pleadings, INS forms, oral trial discourse, and appellate court decisions among others. I plan for us to conduct brief analyses of actual texts every two weeks or so and end with a seminar paper on some aspect of legal discourse, theoretical or applied. I'm asking that those who enroll come to class on the first day with something written in legal language-a car rental form, the rules for determining students' state of residence, a credit card or bank agreement are but a few possible options.

      English 570 is a credit/no credit course in which students sharpen their understanding of the technical, interpersonal, and practical elements involved in effective ESL teaching through regular observations of ESL classes, daily ESL teaching or assistance and observation in an ESL classroom, and seminar discussion of issues and problems related to ESL teaching.  No required texts.  Only open to MAT(ESL) students.

     This course is intended to improve your understanding of the research process, to familiarize you with recent research in second language acquisition, and to provide basic, practical skills in designing, carrying out, and reporting on a research project.  The course will focus primarily on qualitative research, although we will discuss quantitative research as well.  The main work of the quarter involves conducting an original research project.  In addition, you will read and critique selected research in second language acquisition.

      Evaluation and testing of second language proficiency, including testing theory, types of tests, and teacher-prepared classroom tests.  Prerequisite: 571 and 572 or permission of instructor.

     MFA status in Fiction, or permission of professor. Enrollment limit -- 12

     Close readings of the students' own poems with special emphasis on sound and rhythm and meaningful form with a view to completing a coherent thesis.

     How do we understand the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of knowledge in cultures which rely primarily on oral modes of communication?  How does the introduction of systems of writing and literacy affect these cultures?  How do oral and text- or literacy-based traditions interact in early or incomplete stages of literacy?  What is the significance of the medieval scriptorium to the nature of text and interpretation as found in the ancient world and West prior to the invention of the printing press?  We will examine these issues and more in this interdisciplinary seminar, one of the core course for the Graduate Program in Textual Studies but open to all interested graduate students and qualified undergraduates.