Category: Archive courses

Indeed, it is the oddest thing about language, whose history is full of odd things (and one of the oddest facts about human development) that so few people have sat down to reflect systematically about meaning.  — I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1930)
I have been asked by the editor to write on the New Critics, but to engage to do such an essay is very much like embarking on the hunting of the Snark. The New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive beast. Everybody talks about him: there is now rather general agreement about his bestial character; but few could give an accurate anatomical description of him.  — Cleanth Brooks, “The New Criticism” The Sewanee Review 87.4 (Fall 1979)
I guess the sad truth is that no one really thinks (if they ever did) that English as a discipline poses a real threat to the status quo. The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s led some of us to believe that the end of the canon, the end of seemingly objective appraisals of “aesthetic complexity” through close readings, the end of the representation of the culture of white males as culture per se, meant that some major battles in the politics of representation had been won. — Judith Halberstam, “The Death of English” Inside Higher Education (May 9, 2005)
The place to move in the double bind is the classroom. The MLA has a hand there. Help us change the long-standing views of language teaching, culture teaching. Unleash them from their place on the totem pole and from identity, from religion: change their institutional structural position. — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Close Reading,” PMLA 121.5 (October 2006)
“How to do a Close Reading”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adXdTXEzmzE    — Eberlywritingcenter, “How to do a Close Reading” Youtube.com (uploaded March 7, 2011)
This class introduces graduate students to the history of “close reading” as concept and practice. We will survey twentieth century debates about language and interpretation with a focus on textual analysis and the professionalization of academic literary criticism. We will take the rise of English departments as our central focus, but we will certainly discuss its relation to other language and literature departments, to Area Studies, to Comparative Literature, to Cultural Studies, and to Ethnic and Gender/Women/Sexuality Studies. The goal of this course is to survey changing professional “theories” of textual analysis – including practical criticism, formalism, new criticism, deconstruction, and post-structuralism – while also considering those practices of textual analysis that bear strange or subtle relations to these theories. We will make sure to cover hermeneutic, critical, creative, poetic, narrative, descriptive, and reparative practices.
In other words, this is a class on both theory and method. We will review theories and practices that have been central to professionalizing trends in academic institutions: theory has often been associated with the status and value of “research” in the literary humanities, while practice has often been associated with the status and value of “teaching” literature, specifically in undergraduate pedagogy. We will pay close attention to the changing relationships between theories and practices of textual analysis as we work through the materials. The epigraphs preview our trajectory through professionalization and institutionalization, with the final Youtube clip serving as a reminder that “close reading” remains alive and well in undergraduate pedagogy even as professional critique describes its death and zombie-like shuffle through the undergraduate classroom as a kind of uncanny afterlife.
Course Requirements: one in-class presentation on a work of criticism; a critical notebook practicing academic note-taking for future use; one final paper of 13-15 pages treating at least two critical methods and practicing a “close reading” on a text of your choosing.

The Enlightenment in Germany demonstratively kicked the Hanswurst (a raunchy, impromptu clown who actively engaged with the audience) off the stage, and ushered in an attempt to mold a “cultured” nation by means of the theatre. Despite many extreme differences, one thing all the successive 18th-century German literary movements—from sentimentalism and Sturm und Drang to Weimar Classicism and the early romantics—have in common is a desire to wrest control from the actor and put it in the hands of the playwright. In this course, we will explore the resounding successes (and instructive failures) of this dramatic turn in theatrical practice. We will conduct close readings (and imaginative stagings) of plays by Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist. We will also consider the plays in their historical and cultural contexts, and study contemporary theoretical essays on the function of drama.

This course is neither a survey of something called “Feminist Theory,” nor does it focus on any one orientation or topos within feminist theory (on a feminist theory, in other words). Rather, it seeks to lay out and explore a problematic: the articulations of theory with politics. To be sure, every practice (political or other) entails a theory (whether explicit or not), just as every theory is irreducibly political. Yet theory and politics are not simply convertible, insofar as politics — the capacity both to operate within and contest relations of power – depends (for example) on the self-determination of subjects, and their capacity for deliberative action, that theory calls persistently into question. This is not to invoke the old quarrel between post-structuralism and identity knowledges (just when the historically oppressed emerge as the subjects of knowledge within the academy, the argument went, the elite purveyors of post-structuralist theory proclaim the death of the subject) – precisely because antagonists on both sides of that debate were typically interested in managing or resolving the incommensurability of theory and politics. In general, participants in that debate sought either to place theory in service to urgent political projects on the Left, or to insist that we subordinate the scope of political work (and imaginings) to the insights of theory. In this course, I propose to explore the non-identity of theory and politics as necessarily and productively irresolvable. Simply put, theory (in both its structuralist and post-structuralist forms) insists on the splitting of the subject and the limits of our (individual and collective) self-mastery — on a critical orientation to agency and opposition that politics must ultimately suspend. The course is organized around materials and debates that invite us to approach the articulation of theory with politics as a valuable and ongoing (unfinished) labor in the pursuit of an always receding horizon.
Our reading will be organized into three sections. An initial section on “Economy” will consider some of the key feminist explorations of the material and symbolic economies in which subjects, objects, and abject embodiment are (re)produced. This section will include Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women,” Laura Mulvey on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.,” selections from Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions, as well as Karen Joy Fowler’s short novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. In a second section on “Epistemology,” we will engage a few important meditations on the subjects of feminism and its objects of study, including Nancy Hartsock’s and Chela Sandoval’s differing visions of feminist standpoint, Kimberle Crenshaw’s germinal essay on intersectionality, Robyn Wiegman’s reflection on intersectionality in “Critical Kinship,” Gayatri’s Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” alongside her more recent reflections in “The New Subaltern,” Rey Chow’s “The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” selections from Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety, and (and in relation to) Our Sister Killjoy, a novel by Ama Ata Aidoo. A third section, “Pleasure and Danger (or, Complicity),” will explore the implications of the theoretical prospects, practices, and aporias opened in the first two sections with specific reference to the politics of identification and desire in and in the wake of the (so-called) “sex wars.” Materials for this section will likely include Laura Kipnis’s experimental video Ecstasy Unlimited, Liz Grosz’s “Lesbian Fetishsim?,” Kobena’s Mercer’s “Reading Racial Fetishism,” Carla Freccero’s “Notes of a Post-Sex Wars Theorizer,” Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,” and Octavia’s Butler’s final novel, Fledgling.

Historical survey and analysis of criticism (Methodengeschichte) and modern trends in contemporary theory. Methods of research and bibliography, as well as theoretical aspects of practical interpretation.

This course surveys the most important recent thinking about “the text,” construed broadly to mean the object of literary and cultural study from physical bibliography to critical theory. Beginning with late-career calls for a “return to philology” from Paul de Man and Edward Said – the founders of American deconstruction and postcolonial theory respectively – we will look closely at the history of textual criticism and literary interpretation as they diverged in midcentury notions of “copy text” editing and the New Critical “well wrought urn.” We will then move to the epoch-making critiques of this consensus in the “socialized texts” of Jerome McGann and the “material texts” of Roger Chartier, D.F. McKenzie, and Peter Stallybrass. The second half of the course will be given over to perspectives on textual production, reception, and interpretation both canonical (reader-response theory, poststructuralist critiques of authorship, the history of the book) and newly emergent (surface reading, the descriptive turn, queer philology). Readings will include key works by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Macherey. This course is appropriate for anyone who wishes to gain a focused introduction to literary theory and a working vocabulary in literary studies (intertextuality, paratext, author function, implied reader, etc.), as well as for those in other disciplines who wish to gain a theoretical foundation for work in media studies, information science, editing and publishing, or textual studies (see below).
Note: This is one of four core seminars in UW’s Textual Studies Program, a campus-wide course of graduate study emphasizing the comparative, interdisciplinary, cross-historical investigation of material texts in manuscript, print, and digital environments. Course credit will count toward the Textual Studies Ph. D. track in all participating departments.

Grad students register as graduate mentors in German 575 and receive credit for participating in the planning, running, and evaluating of the course.  In the end, they design a syllabus for a lecture/team-learning course of their own. 
Sympathy for the Devil: The Rhetoric of Compassion
German 390 (cross-listed with Philosophy, Comp Lit, CHID, and Classics)
Is compassion the foundation of human morality or a dangerously unreliable emotion? This course examines the strategies and motivations in different media of fostering empathy for commonly held enemies or discriminated groups. We examine the ways that casting minorities as objects of pity can strategically forward—but structurally undermine—the project of creating a more open and tolerant society. The syllabus runs from Ancient Greece to depictions of Nazis and terrorists in modern film, and considers philosophical assessments of sympathy alongside examples of its aesthetic manufacture. Half of our readings are in moral philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Nietzsche, Arendt), and in each case we use the literary text or film (e.g., Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Lessing, Eliot, Brecht) as a kind of experimental field to evaluate the philosophers’ concepts and claims about the moral efficacy of compassion. Students will also work creatively to engender sympathy in four genres (rhetoric, drama, narrative, film).
This course engages in team-based learning. Students will complete four projects that include both creative and analytical components. Groups work to engender sympathy for a “bad guy” in four genres: a speech, a scene, a story, and a visual project. During the final, groups will present their project to the class.

One of the four required core courses in the Graduate Textual Studies Program, this seminar offers an introduction to bibliographical resources for the study of printing as an art and as a means of textual transmission; a practical view of hand and machine press printing; introductory surveys of analytic and descriptive bibliography, of the history of the book and book production, and of current textual theories; as well as practical experience in editing printed texts.

“The Germans and the Greeks” examines the transformations of German ideas about antiquity from the Enlightenment through the twenty-first century. The syllabus runs from Winckelmann to Christa Wolf and explores not only competing images of ‘Greekness’ across the battlefields of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, but also the ways that conceptions of the ancient Other helped to shape notions of what it means to be ‘German.’ We will pay especially close attention to encounters with Homer and the Greek tragedians, and we’ll trace the metamorphoses of influential theories of drama, aesthetics, and translation prompted by these engagements.
Discussion in English; readings in German.

This course asks what makes social policies and institutions ethically acceptable, primarily through a discussion about justice and injustice. Topics may include: cultural relativism, the sources of competing conceptions of justice and equality, cost-benefit analysis, distributive justice, and beneficence.

In this course we will look at various theories of tragedy for purposes of distinguishing it from what Walter Benjamin considered the specifically modern predicament of absolute immanence as depicted in the Baroque mourning play.  In a post-Reformation world in which deeds don’t matter, tragedy is no longer up to the mimetic task prescribed by Aristotle.  Instead, the mourning play, in which the sovereign has no access to an absolute to legitimate his decisions, makes of the hero an anti-hero, of the world a valley of tears.  In that respect, we will also read Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play as a diagnosis of modernity and its ailments. 
We will begin, however, with Plato’s Ion in which ontology is juxtaposed with the constant becoming that goes nowhere or an  “Iontology.”  We will then interrogate Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly for its understanding of catharsis and mimesis.  What assumptions about the world underlie the Aristotelian notion of tragedy?  After reading Antigone we will jump to Hegel’s reflections on that play and tragedy overall in The Aesthetics: How does Hegel come to think of tragedy as something that has been overcome or rendered obsolete?  Next, we will turn to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to understand how Nietzsche rethinks the Greeks to wrest it from the delicacies that framed its appropriation by the German classics. 
More important, we will identify those aspects of Nietzsce’s text that underwrite Benjamin’s Mourning Play.  How does Benjamin refute the ahistorical claims of Nietzsche?  What distinguishes the mourning play from tragedy, the German mourning play from Calderon? To prepare ourselves for Benjamin’s work, we will read  Andreas Gryphius’s Leo Armenius along with Pedro Calderon’s Life is a Dream.  We will conclude the course by questioning what is it that allows for the sudden dialectical reversal at the end of Benjamin’s text.  Has the project succeeded in rupturing the immanence of modernity; has that constellation finally exhausted itself; is it possible now to imagine with Heine a time when capitalism is finally over?
Readings in German (translations of all texts will be available).  Discussion in English.