This is a course on modern criticism from Kant up to the point immediately preceding the onset of structuralism and post-structuralism. We will spend the first half of the term on Kant's Critique of Judgment (known informally as the 'third Critique'), which is universally considered the beginning of modern aesthetics. Up to the last twenty years, its importance for literary criticism lay primarily in its influence on modern 'formalism' in aesthetics; in the last twenty years, debate has focused on the significance of the third Critique's theory of the 'sublime.' Although we will devote some time to the sublime, we will focus primarily on the question of formalist aesthetics because that is the central question for the period in question; hence, the second half of the course will be devoted to various statements of, and attacks on formalism (by Oscar Wilde, the Russian Formalists, Trotsky, Lukacs, and the New Critics).

Texts: Kant, Critique of Judgment. I will also order Critical Theory Since Plato, but this is a big, very expensive book out of which we will only read a few selections; so you might want to make xerox copies of these essays or get them from another source. If you can afford it, however, it is an invaluable work of reference, containing many of the essential texts in critical theory from over two millennia.
The essays from this book that we will read are:
Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Eichenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method
Trotsky, The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism
Lukacs, The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy
Brooks, The Heresy of Paraphrase and Irony as a Principle of Structure

This course will introduce students to recent theoretical work on race, gender, and nation and the intersections among ideologies of racism, sexism and nationalism in the trans-Atlantic context. We will read texts written by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars, focusing particularly on works that have been taken up by literary critics concerned with the role of culture in contesting and/or consolidating various regimes of social oppression and subordination. Throughout the quarter we will seek to engender dialogue among competing theoretical frameworks by discerning the political stakes involved in different kinds of theoretical production. We will also explore the formal choices made by theorists as they seek to reach, challenge, and/or constitute their various audiences. Emphasis will be on close reading.
Syllabus may include, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anthony Appiah, Hortense Spillers, Raymond Williams, Eric Lott, Paul Gilroy, Michael Omi and Howard Winnant, Stuart Hall, Barbara Fields, Benedict Anderson, Anne McClintock, Lisa Lowe, Etienne Balibar, and Gayatri Spivak.

The Romantic period, particularly in British literature, is an era known primarily for its poets. Indeed, the two most prominent British novelists of the period from 1790-1830, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, are figures who fit uneasily at best into the category of Romanticism. Recent literary scholarship, however, has made it increasingly evident that there was considerable writing in many different narrative modes during this era. In fact, in terms of the variety and fluidity of genres represented, this is among the most fertile periods for narrative experimentation in European literary history.

We will be looking at a cross-section of texts representing many of the modes of writing that occurred in this period-autobiography, memoir, essay, novel, short story, satire. We will be considering how the forms of narrative shifted to accommodate changing expectations of literary purposes and how these narratives responded to the highly charged political climate in which they were written.

Texts include: Frankenstein, Rousseau's Confessions and Rêveries, Wollstonecraft's Short Residence and Maria, Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and Caleb Williams, Byron's Don Juan and some Hoffmann short stories. Course requirements will include several short papers and a longer research project on one of the authors from our reading list.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Norton)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (Penguin) (transl. J. M. Cohen)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Penguin; transl. Peter France)
Mary Wollstonecraft & William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs (Penguin)
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria and Mary Shelley, Matilda (Penguin)
William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Broadview)
E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann (Penguin), (transl. R. J. Hollingdale)
Lord Byron, Don Juan (Penguin)

Course description not available.

Symbols of civilization, cities have been a dominant site and object of cultural production since the beginning of history. Cities are at the forefront of cultural and social change, displaying the symptoms of social and cultural development most fully. Inspiring extremes of emotional responses ranging from praise to condemnation in anti-urban or pro-urban ideologies, the city has evoked ahistorical archetypes and myths (babylon, jungle, utopia). Frequently, the city comes to stand for something larger than the physical city itself-concepts of an established social order, or of alternative nofficial social visions. The city is produced by conflicting social interests and values in an "endless historical struggle over the definition of urban meaning" (Manuel Castells). The morphology of the cityscape is like a text to be read by an observer who creates a mental image of that city. The city is produced twice, once as a physical reality and once as discourse (Lefebvre). The mental picture and the textualized city, as much as the physical urban environment, must be the concerns of anyone who makes their way through the city and its representations.

The goal of this course is to explore the "city which is not one," following critiques of classical sociological constructs of urbanism as a singular way of life defined by psychic overstimulation, anonymity, and the decline of bonds of kinship (Wirth, Simmel). The evidence for this claim will be twofold, pairing urban theory with modern literature as twin sites of discursive productions of images of the city. To further open up the urban question beyond U.S. American urban attitudes (i.e. the stereotype of American intellectuals' hostility towards the city), our readings in theory and literature will come from the Am(é)ricas. The goal is to establish a dialogue between North American and Latin American writers and theorists, as well as between minority writers and traditional intellectuals.

Readings will be organized around the following concepts: 1) The Social Spectacle of Inner City streets: Urban Villagers at Home in the Barrio. (Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street; Jane Jacobs, from Love and Death of Great American Cities) 2) Walker in the City vs. the flaneur: the Urban Observer and the Everyday. (short stories by Poe, Henry James, New York chronicles of José Martí; theories by Benjamin & de Certeau) 3) The Lettered City and the Labyrinth of Signs: Latin American Intellectuals, Urbanism, and the State. (literature from Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo and Jorge Luis Borges; theory: Angel Rama, The Lettered City) 4) The City and the Grassroots: Ethnic & Gay Urban Subcultures (literature: Luis Valdéz, Zoot Suit, Richard Rodriguez, poetry by Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén; theories on urban subcultures by Stuart Cosgrove, Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino and John Tagg, Octavio Paz, Manuel Castells) 5) Reading the Text of the Modern City: Fragmentation and Urban Collage (from Williams, Paterson, Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; theories by Kevin Lynch and Lewis Mumford) 6) Fortress L.A.: Late Capitalism and the Destruction of Public Space (Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, Helena Maria Viramontes; theory: Mike Davis) 7) The Informational City and the Space of Flows (science fiction; theory: Manuel Castells)

This course will inquire into powerful critiques and defenses of poetry, written within the last several decades, especially as these address gender. We will consider the genre of poetry as well as the concept of the poetic apart from traditional verse forms. The seminar will concentrate on three different poetic "sites," in which poetry or the poetic has been central to redefining gender: 1) the poetry career of Adrienne Rich as it parallels and defines the feminist movement; 2) the hybrid poetic theories and essays of the so-called French Feminists and select Americans, such as Trinh Minh-ha and Eve Sedgwick; 3) and the experimental poetry of Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, and Theresa Cha. We will take up questions of poetic agency and poetry's others, or muse figures, in relationship to issues of poetic production and reception. In addition to making presentations on the above, a few seminar members may elect to focus their presentation (and papers) on other poets to be worked out with me at the beginning of the quarter. Encouragement will be given to the study of male poets whose careers raise compelling questions about gender, such as John Ashbery, Alan Grosman, and Charles Olson.

This course focuses on the bodies of the biotechnological (or biomedical) revolution, emphasizing the materiality of the body rather than the virtuality of the body associated with the cyberspace of the communications revolution (although the two inevitably converge at many points). At issue are assembled bodies and manufactured bodies, commodified bodies and bodyparts for sale, reproductive and postreproductive bodies, self-reproducing bodies, bodies at risk and bodies proscribed, bodies sick and dying, and emergent bodies. The new technomedical science of genetic engineering and recombinant DNA, assisted reproduction and life-extension technologies, and organ transplantation constitutes the context of our deliberations. We will read speculative (technoscience) fiction, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), as well as disability and illness narratives, including Michael Berube's Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and An Exceptional Child (1996) and Alice Wexler on Huntington's disease. Screenings will include Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Yvonne Rainer's Murder and murder (1997). Theoretical and critical readings will be drawn from the work of Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan and Don Ihde, Donna Haraway and Evelyn Fox Keller, Paul Rabinow and Susan Squier, and N. Katherine Haylesand Allucquere Rosanne Stone, among others. A phenomenology of technology, gender, and ethics will be points of entry.

Coinciding with the course is the opening of an exhibit, curated by Robin Held, at the Henry Art Gallery on the intersections between art and the human genome project as well as a conference, also organized by the Henry, entitled "Genesis: Paradigms Lost and Found" on April 5-6, 2002. Susan Squier, Brill Professor of Women's Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University, will be a guest speaker on Monday, April 29, 2002. Squier is the author of Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994) and coeditor, with E. Ann Kaplan, of Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (1999).

Also coinciding with "Science, Technology, and the Body" is an experimental crossdisciplinary undergraduate course, entitled "In Vivo: Traversing Scientific and Artistic Representations of Life." This five-credit course, which is scheduled to meet on Tuesday and Thursday evenings during the spring quarter, will be team-taught by a theorist of technoscience, a digital artist, and a research scientist; in addition to a large lecture, it will have a small laboratory component in which undergraduate students will be asked to create material out of tissue cell cultures rather than proceeding as in a conventional lab, where the exercises are driven by hypotheses and the outcomes are predicted in advance.

In addition to several written assignments and participation in discussion, graduate students in English 556A/Comparative Literature 535 will be asked to attend the conference at the Henry Art Gallery and at least one of the sessions of the undergraduate course.

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar explores modernist abstraction across different artistic disciplines. In search of commonalities and differences between various forms of abstract expression, we will look at literature, music, theater, film, painting and sculpture. The first decades of the previous century saw many groundbreaking developments within these diverse art forms and a rich cross- fertilization between them, yet the roots of abstraction can be traced back past Romanticism, and its legacy is still with us today. In general surveys, abstraction is often invoked as a cross-disciplinary adventure, yet rarely in terms that go beyond vague analogies, whereas more advanced courses generally remain limited to individual art forms. In this course, we will explore the ways we can understand modernist abstraction across disciplines and mediums and from various formal and philosophical points of view.

We will call on the expertise of guest speakers from the UW, who will each coordinate and present their own session. Marshall Brown (Comparative Literature) will trace the romantic roots of abstraction in literature and music. Douglas Collins (Romance Languages) will discuss what he sees as a French fear surrounding the figure. Brian Reed (Comparative Literature) will explore intersections between music and abstraction from Schönberg through minimalism. Jennifer Bean (Comparative Literature) will examine the emergence of cinema along with chronophotography and notions of the readymade. Herbert Blau (English) will discuss his involvement in experimental theater. Marek Wieczorek (Art History) will be the coordinator and anchor, covering the visual arts within late 19th- and early 20th-century avant-garde culture.

Students from different departments are encouraged to participate and share ideas central to their respective disciplines so as to create a friendly atmosphere for comparison. The requirements for the course are short, weekly reading summaries, incorporating commentary and questions to be used in class discussions (2 pages), a 15- to 20-page paper, and a brief in-class presentation based on the paper. Advanced undergraduate students should contact the instructor: marek@u.washington.edu. The seminar is sponsored by the Walter H. Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

The term discourse functions in a wide range of academic settings, with quite diverse meanings. In this course, we'll be concentrating on two linguistic versions: first, the linguistic analysis of language beyond the sentence level and, second, critical/theoretical interpretations of those linguistic approaches. In the first section, we'll be studying the basic components of discourse, examining, for example, what it means when your conversation partner begins a response with well and how to classify interruptions. We'll examine how "talk" turns up in "text", as well as generic structures of text, along with cohesion and coherence, agency, speech acts and politeness. With the tools of analysis in place, we'll begin to sort through approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis, one version of which is neo-marxist, the other Foucauldian and conclude with a careful look at discourse applications to texts.

Texts: Johnstone, Barbara: Discourse Analysis; Mills, Sara: Discourse; Chouliaraki, Lillie, and Norman Fairclough: Discourse in Late Modernity; Barton, Ellen, and Gail Stygall, eds: Discourse Studies in Composition.

The Web is the natural home of imagetext. The new technology gives power as never before not only to combine words and images in different ways but to spatialize words, moving them toward images, and to place them in hypertext chains with images. Relations of texts and images will be the key focus in thinking of the Web as a new medium. We begin by discussing sections from Mitchell's Picture Theory and Elkin's Domain of Images in the computer lab and will make liberal use of the machines both for viewing and for making hyperimage-texts. No previous HTML experience is required (but it does make things a little easier …). Seminar paper should be critical reading and theorizing of one or more sites suitable for publication on line.

ENGL 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. The course is intended for graduate students enrolled in the Department of English MATESOL Program.

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 on a variety of research models, including survey research, interaction analysis, case study, experimental research, and ethnography. 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.

This course examines different forms of testing and assessment (standardized and authentic) instruments used for English language learners in schools and higher education. Considerable emphasis will be placed on theoretical considerations that need to be made in the testing and assessment process. The course will particularly address how assessment can be used to strengthen teaching and learning environments by having participants engage in different hands-on activities and projects. The major project for this course will be the creation of a portfolio, part of which will be a project either in an adult or K-12 ESL setting.

These days, we pay much attention to the nature and fate of reading, and the possible replacement of the book by digital media. In this course, however, we will look at-and make-books in their most physical forms. I am particularly interested in two questions: 1) what is a book? And 2) how do text, visual elements, and physical structure interact to create a reading/viewing experience? In an attempt to answer these questions and raise others, we will explore a wide variety of contemporary materials: novel, memoir, guide book, paintings, poetry (concrete and otherwise), and artists' books. I hope you will make wonderful books in this class, but I also hope that by paying such close attention to the physical act of experiencing these books, you will learn more about reading any book, any text, and more about structuring and presenting your own writing or art work.

As this is a studio class as well as a seminar, please come prepared to cut, paste, and sew as well as read and look. No previous visual art or book arts experience is necessary, though an interest in the visual as well as the verbal is required. Assignments will include two papers, a final project in which you create a book, and several shorter writing/making exercises.
Required Books:
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide
Carole Maso, The Art Lover
WG Sebald, Austerlitz
Keith A. Smith, Structure of the Visual Book
Terry Sultan, Ken Aptekar: Talking to Pictures
A Xerox course pack

There will also be a small fee for materials.

Priority given to Creative Writing MFA students. Other interested students (English grads and advanced undergrads, studio artists, information science students) please see the instructor, and check with advisors in your own departments about whether the course will meet major requirements.

Course description not available at this time.

Course description not available at this time.

Course description not available at this time.