At the turn of the last century a well known journal changed its name from The Nineteenth Century to The Nineteenth Century -- And After thus dividing all time between that magnificent epoch and everything that would follow it.  In the course we will focus on five texts central to 19th century self-definition -- central, that is, to the definition of the self and its conjunction with a particular period.  In principle, these five texts also serve as an introduction of the field to people whose previous work has primarily been before "-- And After."
      Texts: William Wordsworth, The Prelude; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam; Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge; George Eliot, Middlemarch; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, The Subjection Of Women.

      This course explores the relationship between contemporary U.S. American ethnic literature and theory and postcolonial theory.  Central questions are: What is the relationship of the legacies of the U.S. colonial past to the shaping of African American, Asian American, Chicano,a/Latino,a and American Indian writing and theory?  How is postcolonial theorizing and postmodern theorizing related or unrelated to U.S. American, racialized ethnic literature?  How does U.S. Euro-American ethnic literature/immigrant literature relate to U.S. American racialized ethnic literatures?  And the umbrella question to these is how does American ethnic literature and theory define citizenship, nation, and "America," in the context of the postmodern fascination with appearance and non-essentialist represention on the one hand, and on the other, the American ethnic moves of becoming American and validating the reality of experience.
      The course focuses on the intersections of theory and texts; therefore, each student will select two novels from differing traditions (I will give the parameters for selection the first day of the course).  Theoretical texts from each U.S. tradition will be on reserve as well as key theoretical postcolonial texts.   Required texts are: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner, and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Ania Loomba's Colonial, Postcolonial, and a course reader of American ethnic literary theory that will include excerpts from Satya Mohanty's Literary Theory and the Claims of History and selections from Lewis Gordon's work on Fanon.  Please read Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth before the quarter begins.

      This is the second part of the two-part sequence in Old English Language and Literature, completion of which may serve to fulfill a graduate language requirement.  In this seminar we will undertake a close reading of Beowulf, the most substantial surviving Old English poem, in the original language.  Considerable attention will be paid to the most recent work in Beowulf studies, notably Kevin S. Kiernan's revised edition (1996) of his controversial study of the original manuscript; feminist criticism on Wealtheow and other women figures in the poem; ideological background studies of the Germanic migrations; and archeological and more broadly cultural approaches to the contextualization of this enigmatic poem.
      Course Texts: Klaeber, Beowulf (3rd ed.); Alexander, Beowulf.

      Examining a range of medieval literature with classical themes or sources, this class addresses medieval ideas of history and the relation of the medieval present to the classical past, as it addresses current debates concerning historicist methodologies in reading medieval literature.  Are medievalists 'marching under the banner of the historical imperative', as Lee Patterson claims?  Should they be?  What do poems with classical sources or themes tell us about medieval ideas of the value of history?  of its accessibility through textual tradition?  What does the medieval perspective on classical traditions teach us about our own interest in the past?  Course readings are organized by genre or agenda: we will consider the surfacing of classical themes in medieval romances like the Roman de Thèbes (in translation) and Troilus and Criseyde; moralized versions of classical story, including the Confessio Amantis and Henryson's "Orpheus and Eurydice"; and texts that use the authority of classical literature to revise the representation of women, namely Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies.  We will conclude with excerpts from Douglas's translation of the Aeneid and his reflections on medieval (specifically Chaucerian) rewriting of the Latin epic.

      As a logical phrase “Classical Imitation” has the same status as “bovine cow”: a tautology, one word implying the other.  A “classic,” by definition, is something imitated; classical art depends for its effect upon the beholder’s memory of the thing to which it refers.  To imitate is not copy, of course, but to allude: keeping the original in mind, one notes the changes that make its avatar significant.
      In the context of English studies, “classical” has picked up its familiar restrictions: not any models but Greek and Roman ones.  This comes about because the poets of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were so often trying to bring the achievements of the Greek and Roman poets into English.  They did this sometimes by direct translation, sometimes by allusive recall; we shall study attempts of both sorts in this class.  Examples will come from all three centuries, including Wyatt doing Petrarch, Chapman doing Homer, Jonson dramatizing Tacitus and Sallust, Dryden doing Plautus and translating Vergil, a variety of poets being Horace, and Pope translating Homer.  The grandest imitation of the whole long period of grand imitations, the one which declared itself to be soaring above its originals and which to some extent silenced them all, was Paradise Lost.  That poem is far too big for a course like this to handle, but we’ll get a glimpse of it when Pope does Milton.

      This seminar offers an opportunity to consider the way the visual and verbal representations of the human body chart the development of new ideas of the human self in English culture.  We'll survey portraiture in England from Holbein through the painters of the Elizabethan era (including miniaturists Hilliard and Oliver), the establishment of Netherland painters in Jacobean London, the revolutionary works of Van Dyck in the Stuart court, and the Restoration works of Sir Peter Lely and his followers.  We'll consider the survival and development of a "native tradition" (Dobson, Reilly).  We'll set the portraits of men and women (aristocrats, writers, nameless ladies, Oliver Cromwell, Henrietta Maria's dwarf, the housekeeper of Windsor Castle, and many more) alongside literary works.  Sonnets will be juxtaposed to miniatures; Jonson's poetic celebration of Venetia Digby will be set next to Van Dyck's portraits of her.  We'll pay attention also to portraits of Donne, Jonson, and finally Pope and early 18th century ladies (this will be "the long 17th century") and to the way these poets thematize pictures in their poems.  Lots of paintings; lots of poetry.  A few of the issues: the body as sign - of?; the mythic body vs.  the historical body as "monumental"; the "classical" body vs.  the "grotesque" body; the construction of identity and the emergence of "interiority" in portraiture; the "two bodies" of the monarch; "ancillary" figures (servants, often minority; horses and dogs; friends and family); gender and portraiture (including women painters); conventional poses and the relationship between painter and subject; narrative and metaphorical portraiture; words/texts in portraits; self- portraiture (Van Dyck; Artemisia Gentileschi; even Rembrandt).  We'll range a bit into some later uses of Renaissance portraits, too: Robert Browning's dramatic monologues; Cindy Sherman's self-portraits.  Readings: Brilliant, Portraiture; Wendorf, The Elements of Life.  Writers studied will include Donne, Jonson, the Cavaliers, Restoration women poets, Pope.  Students will be asked to work in the Art Library as well as Suzzallo. Requirements: class discussion; class presentation; final paper.  In addition to required texts, there will be a packet of required secondary readings.

      In this course we will study eighteenth-century literary orientalism.  While orientalism has - deservedly - received much bad press as an unreliable discourse of representation since Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), the last two decades of ideology critique have perhaps flattened appreciations of the discourse's versatility.  The publication of Antoine Galland's translation of The One Thousand and One Nights (1704-17) marks an important eighteenth-century departure for what Tzvetan Todorov has called "apsychological literature."  The bulk of the course will focus on some of the brilliant applications of orientalism to political satire (Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet); to alternative imaginations of sexuality (Crébillon's Le Sopha, Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets, and Beckford's Vathek); to moral thought (Voltaire's Zadig, Johnson's Rasselas, and Sheridan's History of Nourjahad); to anthropology (Selections from Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages américains); and to representations of women (Montagu's Turkish Letters, Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai and Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne).  To accommodate a variety of students all French texts will be read in English translation.

      Since the Bible (in the King James Version) is clearly the most important influence on Blake's works and is also, in his words, the "Great Code of Art," it makes sense to read Blake and the Bible together.  The primary focus of the course will be on learning to read Blake as a poet; a secondary purpose will be to read portions of the Bible and to understand them both in traditional and in Blakean terms.  More specifically, we will try to understand the relation between the Bible and Blake's biblical project, which he called the "Bible of Hell." This project includes at least the Books of Urizen, Ahania, and Los, and we might also include, in a broader version of the project, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Everlasting Gospel, and The Ghost of Abel. We will also be reading one of Blake's three major prophetic works and his Book of Job.  From the Bible, we will read Genesis and Exodus, some of the Prophets, Job, the Gospel of John, and Revelation.  And we will consider some Songs of Innocence and of Experience, letters, and illustrations of the Bible.  I do NOT assume that you already have some expertise on Blake or on the Bible.  There will be a term paper and a shorter paper connected with an oral presentation.
      No prerequisites.  Enrollment limit - 13.  Two more places available if not taken as Relig 570.

      We will begin by addressing American exoticism - an aesthetic extension of nineteenth-century Western imperialism -- as a mode of travel narrative that ostensibly explores and makes contact with foreign peoples and alternative societies, but that in works such as Melville's Typee at best reaches an equivocal horizon where a sense of otherness, in becoming largely assimilated to known cultural models, at best only dimly shows through.  The second portion of the seminar will then address what Stanley Cavell terms the "uncanniness of the ordinary" as an inversion of the American exotic.  Here in a stay-at-home literature, it is the "'fantastic in what human beings will accustom themselves to" once the "everyday world" is sufficiently defamiliarized that surfaces in writing by Emily Dickinson, Rebecca Harding Davis, the mature Herman Melville, and other authors.  How the latent "oddness of the everyday world" is thrown into relief by American writers as a deliberate antidote to the great public appetite for spurious forms of exotica and as a window into the unsuspected interior of America will become the main focus of the second half of the course.
      Readings in wide variety of nineteenth-century American authors, including Melville, Poe, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, and Henry James.  Theoretical readings such as Edward Said on "Orientalism," W.J.T.  Mitchell on the "landscape of imperialism," and Stanley Cavell on the "uncanniness of the ordinary" will provide a vocabulary and a context for exploring selected texts.

      The main "shift" in the title of this course is from an Asian American "literature of immigration" to a "literature of diaspora." Historically, a pronounced shift occurred in 1965 when the immigration laws of the United States changed - from a program of exclusion of Asians and a prior history denying Asians citizenship, to the elimination of national quotas restricting immigration.  Engaged with the earlier history, Asian American literature of immigration and the discourses it has engendered tend to call for the inclusion of Asian American subjects into the nation, the United States.  One of its tropes is a cultural break between Asian immigrants and their homelands, a break usually concerning the "Americanization" (sometimes assumed, sometimes questioned) of the individual and the family.  Asian American literature of diaspora implies the scattering of peoples from Asian points of origin, and a question underlying much of this literature is one of the subject's relationship with "Asia" and one's continuing participation in a specific, current Asian culture.  This is an Asian American literature where it is possible for characters to be in touch with people and pop culture in both Asia and America and in real time.  We shall also be asking questions about an Asian American "literature of exile," diversity within the category called "Asian American literature," relations among ethnic literary categories, and the interpreting of literary forms and aesthetics in relation with themes and contexts.  Readings will be highly selective.  But in much larger measure than the required texts can possibly represent, the studies and discussions in the course will include "classics" as well as current works.  Among the works and authors to be studied are, for example, stories by Sui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, and Hisaye Yamamoto; Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart; Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter; Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter and John Okada's No-No Boy; stories by N. V. M. Gonzalez; Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea; Bienvenido Santos his "Immigration Blues" as well as stories of the Filipino as "exile"; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior; Joy Kogawa's Obasan; Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters; Frank Chin's Donald Duk; Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker; Shawn Wong's Homebase and American Knees; Meena Alexander's Fault Lines; and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. Our studies will also include articles of criticism, theory, and resources in such collections as Reading the Literatures of Asian America (Lim and Ling, eds.), An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (Cheung, ed.), A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature (Wong and Sumida, eds.), and others.

      This quarter we will investigate the prevalent belief during the years following the Great War that civilization was in a state of crisis.  Using Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents as our starting point, we will consider modernist texts such as Eliot's The Waste Land, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Huxley's Point Counter Point, as well as some examples of popular culture, journalism, and historical documents in order to explore the concept of modernism within its larger cultural framework.

      In this course we'll be exploring questions connected with teaching close reading to undergraduates.  Some of these questions will be at least mundane (What kind of book is best for a class like this?) and will have more or less satisfying answers.  Some other questions (just what do you think you're doing, anyway?) will not be answered so easily.  But all of the questions, hard or easy, will be concerned with both teaching and poetry.
      Expect to write every week and to teach poems to the rest of the class at least once every two weeks.  You will also be expected to act as intelligent critics about your classmates' readings and teaching, and we will give particular attention to Frost's dictum that "the ear is the true reader."
      Books:  Helen Ventler, Poems, Poets, Poetry;   Donald Hall, To Read a Poem.

      One of the greatest challenges feminist theory currently confronts is that of elaborating anti-racist politics and critical practices.  In this course we will examine recent feminist writing that treats questions of race, racism, and anti-racism.  We will discuss the historical legacy of racism within the feminist movement, an array of analytic methods capable of addressing the interarticulation of racism and sexism, and the pitfalls and possibilities of creating feminist hermeneutics capable of keeping pace with processes of uneven development and globalization.  The course is thoroughly interdisciplinary; we will read creative texts alongside more recognizably theoretical works by feminists situated across the disciplines.
      Readings will include: Lisa Lowe, Patricia Williams, Louise Newman, Robyn Weigman, Ruth Frankenburg, Aihwa Ong, Gayatri Spivak, Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany.

     This course surveys systematic approaches to the analysis of texts.  We will examine a wide variety of approaches including linguistics, conversation analysis, ethnography, critical language study.  We will explore means for describing the discourse we find around us from literary texts to popular culture to classroom interactions and examine how these display and (re)produce the cultures from which they spring.

      In this course, we will approach contemporary rhetorical theory by way of genre theory, which will enable us to problematize popular notions of rhetoric as a type of discourse or a skill.  We will examine rhetoric not only as a dimension of all discourse, but also as "the condition of our existence"--a way of being, knowing, and acting in the world (what David Fleming calls "anthropological rhetoric").  As such, we will be studying rhetoric as both an action and an occasion--a habit as well as a habitat for acting in language.  We will begin the course with an introduction to genre theory and explore its claims that genres are not just ways we define and organize kinds of texts, but also ways we rhetorically define and organize kinds of social actions.  From there, we will grapple with such questions as: What is rhetoric?  What is a rhetorical situation (and can there be such a thing as a non-rhetorical situation)?  What is the relationship between social and rhetorical action, and to what extent does genre shape both?  Where do genres exist?  How and why do genres change?  Along the way, we will speculate on the "nature" and role of the writer, reader, text, and context in non-literary and literary genres, as well as the relationship between power and rhetoric, in particular, the kinds of social actions, identities, and relations that genres rhetorically make possible.  In addition to leading class discussions, seminar participants will: 1) present a conference-style paper which invites them to (re)consider, through the lens of genre theory, a primary text of their choosing (for example, a work by Halliday; Saussure; Foucault; Derrida; Irigaray; Cixous; Kuhn; Geertz; Anzaldua; Giddens; LeFevre; Freud; Austin; Villanueva; Kent; Bolter; and yes, even Einstein), and 2) write a final research paper or its equivalent.

      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 provides an overview of approaches, materials and techniques for teaching English to non-native speakers.  Each of these aspects of teaching is looked at from the basis of a few well-established principles of second language acquisition pedagogy.  The course is divided into three main parts: (1) Principles, History and Contexts; (2) Teaching Techniques; (3) Pragmatics.  Students will be expected to participate in in-class discussions and demonstrations, work on a group project and write at least two papers during the course.  Prerequisites: Linguistics 445 or ENGL 571.

      Concentrating on your writing and on your concerns as writers.  Forty pages of fiction and one brief paper required as is a committed presence in the workshop. Expect to read your classmates' work thoroughly and respond to it with written comments.  I am especially interested in working on ways to heighten connections between the form and content of your work.  To that end, we'll make a visit to the library's Book Arts Collection early in the quarter.  For first year MFA fiction writers.  Others with instructor's permission.

     A close examination of the students' work with an emphasis on the enhancement of connections among sound, rhythm, and meaning and on useful organization and revision.

     The class will be a seminar for MFA students who hold teaching assistantships.  The students will meet occasionally with the instructor to discuss their teaching.  Time and place TBA.  No texts.

      This two-credit course is an introduction to research methods in the humanities, specifically literature, using a combination of traditional (e.g. print) and electronic resources.  Students will become familiar with the scholarly and professional literature of their field, locating, evaluating, and using it effectively in their research.  The course will be process-based to provide students with the broadest set of information literacy skills which can be used in other courses both within and outside of the humanities.  There will be brief weekly assignments and a final annotated bibliography.  Students will also have the option of producing their final projects as Web pages; this training will be available as an adjunct to the course.  If you have any questions or would like further information, please contact me via e-mail at helenew@u.washington.edu.

      This course is one of the four core courses developed by the campus-wide Textual Studies Initiative. Course credit will count toward the Textual Studies track in all participating departments and may count toward the Critical Theory concentration in Comparative Literature.  The course is open to all graduate students and advanced undergraduates.  Students completing this course will develop basic skills of textual scholarship which will be of help for other courses.
      The goal of this course is to challenge the assumption that textual theory and practice occupy a domain separate from literary theory and criticism.  Confronting this territorial fallacy, the course will show that developments in contemporary theory have influenced, and at times radically altered, the direction of textual studies; and conversely, that textual scholars have often anticipated and conceptualized the speculations of theorists in intellectually provocative ways.  The course will offer an introduction to the forms and some of the specialized skills of literary scholarship: the use of literary archives; aspects of physical bibliography and the printing and production of books; scholarly editing; manuscript-based textual criticism; and the history and sociology of the book.  It will familiarize students with major theories of textual criticism that address the concepts of authorship, authority, and authenticity; text, "work" and the physical book; the relationship of biographical and sociological contexts to text, and of creators to producers of literature; and the functions of readerships.  These concepts will be used to analyze the forgery of paintings and texts from the past, and the philosophies of curation of historic houses.
      ASSIGNMENTS include a review of a critical edition and a paper which, among other choices can be: 1) a critical edition reading text (with editorial rationale) of a poem or short story, 2) an essay based on textual criticism tracing the development of a work; 3) an essay on a topic in editorial theory (choices include orality and literacy; authorship, copyright, ghost writing; documentary versus idealist editing and the anti-editing school; historic house and art restoration as a form of editing; musicological editing); and 4) an essay on a topic in the History of the Book (e.g.  the Bible as book; circulating libraries; print culture versus electronic culture; creating readerships in the age of the novel).
      Professor Eggert is Visiting Professor of English from the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, Australia.  He is the author of numerous influential essays on editorial theory, history of the book and the interdisciplinarity of texts, and editor of several works by D.  H.  Lawrence, Henry Kingsley and Joseph Conrad.  Professor Eggert is director (since 1993) of the Australian Scholarly Editions Center at the University of South Wales, founder of the Colonial Texts Series published by the New South Wales University Press, and General Editor of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature.