Category: Archive courses

Originating in 17th-century Europe as the official style of Absolutism and the Counter-Reformation and born as an interartistic expression, the baroque traveled around the world in the wake of empire. In the New World as well as other overseas colonies of Catholic nations such as Spain and Portugal, it was gradually transculturated by indigenous and mestizo artisans whose labor produced the monuments of the colonial baroque in the Americas (known as the New World baroque). The 20th and 21st centuries have seen multiple series of cycles of baroque revivals (the so-called neobaroque) in Europe, across Latin and North America and beyond, which extend across forms usually considered separately, such as modernism and postmodernism. From today’s vantage point, the baroque is no longer European or an early modern historical period, but rather a distributed transhistorical, transnational, and interartistic expression that has been profoundly transformed and refracted as it circulated farther from home and further through time. Even as it is claimed under identitarian paradigms (the baroque as a uniquely Spanish or Latin American sensibility), it remains at the same time resolutely non-identitarian and cosmopolitan, closely linked to the problem of modernity, in other words, globalization.
The concept of world literature is an attempt to move beyond the dichotomy between old Eurocentric canons of comparative literature and new postcolonial ones. This seminar assesses its usefulness as a hermeneutic for the neobaroque, an expression that straddles the divide between the European and the postcolonial, extending across global hierarchies between first-world centers and (semi)peripheries. We will focus on neobaroque fiction from Cuba (Alejo Carpentier), Germany/England (W.G. Sebald), the U.S. (Djuna Barnes), and Chile (José Donoso), but students are welcome to explore neobaroques from other national or ethnic contexts or other genres (poetry). We will consider baroque theories by Walter Benjamin, Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Irlemar Chiampi, Bolívar Echeverría, and world literature theories by Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Pheng Cheah, Mariano Siskind, and Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih. The (neo)baroque is an aesthetic of excess (not minimalism–“less is more”–but “more is more”), a capacious form that allows for the inclusion of the different and the strange, one reason why few styles have lent themselves to bending so many ways as the (neo)baroque.
Required texts:
Alejo Carpentier, Concierto barroco (1974)
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (1995)
José Donoso, The House in the Country (1978)
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds. Baroque New Worlds:
Writing Assignments: 10-12 page research paper

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, as well as practical experience in editing printed texts. Many of the sessions are are taught by invited UW experts: Sandra Kroupa, Books Arts and Rare Book Curator, Special Collections, UW (Labs on Paper, Ink, Binding, Printing, Descriptive Bibliography, and Contemporary Book Arts); Faye Cristenberry, Reference and English Studies Librarian, UW (Lab on Bibliographical Resources);  Jeff Knight, English, UW, and Geoff Turnovsky, French, UW (History of the Book); Tom Lockwood, Professor Emertius, UW (Editing Henry Fielding); Thomas Deardorff (Copyright), and possibly others.       

Catalog Description: 

An examination of the theoretical and methodological issues attending the study of printed texts; training in bibliography and the history of the book from Gutenberg’s hand press to the machine and periodical presses of the nineteen and twentieth centuries; and contemporary book art. Offered: jointly with C LIT 553.
 
https://english.washington.edu/courses/2017/winter/engl/503/a
 

Fashion and Modernism
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” –Oscar Wilde
Fashion explains everything.
More specifically, to be modern is to be in fashion—to be à la mode. The words are born of the same root: modo/mode/modernism/mood. Accordingly modernists from Baudelaire to Woolf are invested in fashion. “Fashion and Modernism” examines some aspects in the constellation of English and European sartorial culture circa the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s, with a few dips into America, accessories, and the contemporary moment.
“Fashion” in this context means both clothing and style—so things shall be explored alongside mien—that je ne sais quoi—that which evades tangible recording, rational thought, or explanation. While a major motif of the course is the consumption of female fashion, we will also explore the history of the dandy, theories of ornamentation, alongside emergent forms of urbanism, spatiality, and embodiment. Topics will include shopping and the rise of the department store; anti-ornament and anti-fashion; the flâneur/flâneuse; fashion of the historical avant-garde, and literary and visual archival instances foregrounding the fashion industry. Readings will range from the literary, the contextual, the theoretical, and the sociological(ish). We will have an archival sortie in which students will be exposed to what it is like to actually be around the stuff (“stuff”: a word that originally referred to the material for a dress).
“F&M” is a reading-intensive and discussion-based seminar. Students will be responsible for class presentations and a final paper employing some archival historical material from the modernist era, for instance culling from a period Vogue.
NOTE: Students are urged to have taken at least one previous course in British, American, or European modernism. College counts. Our methodology will be an historical one focused on the specified time period. Prior to the first class, have (re)read Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman” from After the Great Divide, and make a dent in Zola’s wonderful novel Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), in the Nelson translation (Oxford World Classics, ISBN 978-0199536900). Zola is summer reading at its greatest, by the way. All readings will be in English. The class’s dress code will be announced anon.

Engages ongoing critical conversations that inform English studies, including: language, textual production, disciplinarity, the university, capital, nation formation, postcolonialism, the environment, race, gender, class, and sexuality. The historical focus is contemporary, with attention to foundational modern theorists.

Cultural Studies: Methods and Popular Objects
This course is primarily intended for students interested in designing research projects on topics in popular culture, though it can also serve as a more general introduction to the methods and conceptual frameworks of cultural studies, specifically the Birmingham school and Stuart Hall’s work.  The course will focus on a particular tendency within cultural studies, what Richard Johnson calls its object-driven dimension, which emphasizes how the study of popular objects and the tracing of their movement across the boundaries of institutional knowledge formations produces self-reflection on and critique of disciplinary concepts and their limitations.  Our particular focus will be on how key concepts of literary studies get reworked in popular contexts, including such categories as the author, the text, the reader and the reading process, literary value and value hierarchies (high and low, art and mass or commercial culture, originality and formula or banality), and literary language or the relation between literature and rhetoric.   
This approach stands in partial contrast to the definition of cultural studies as a theoretical formation (primarily a synthesis of Marxism and structuralism/post-structuralism [i.e., Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”]), or the association of cultural studies with cultural politics and ideology critique – that is, with multiculturalism or “new” social movements, as highlighted within the history of the reception of the Birmingham school within the U.S.  This course’s approach to the significance of studying popular objects also stands in partial tension with the Foucauldian emphasis on how we construct our objects of analysis and the power/knowledge relations involved in such constructions; instead, we will be pursuing more of a negative dialectic, in Adorno’s sense of privileging the position of the object over the subject of knowledge.  What kind of materiality do objects of analysis have, within the critical traditions of cultural studies, and how can investment in objects generate greater methodological self-consciousness?  We will necessarily have to consider how the emphasis on popular culture overlaps with these other ways of defining cultural studies, of course.
The course will combine some theoretical readings with a focus on case studies or touchstones in the history of cultural studies work on popular culture objects, along with some selection of primary works.  The objects we will consider, or which will be considered by the critics we read, will include genre fiction (especially science fiction, fantasy, and romance, though possibly also some detective fiction); fan fiction and other forms of fan culture; visual culture, including film, but especially television and comics or graphic novels; music, subcultural style, and fashion; and new media and internet culture, especially interactive fiction, with some gestures toward gaming.  We will be interested in how to negotiate the tension between general, transmedia forms of textual, narrative, or ideological analysis and the specificity of the formal apparatuses of different media and genre formations.  We will also discuss the theoretical and methodological significance of specific practices of popular cultural production, such as varieties of realism and anti-realist narrative disruptions; collaborative or “shared-world” authorship; fan fiction or “textual poaching”; ret-conning or retroactive continuity; and the textuality of “vast narratives,” including serial publication or broadcast, the comics’ model of the “shared universe,” and hypertext linkages.
Students will choose either to write one long final paper or 2-3 shorter papers over the course of the quarter.
Much of our reading will consist of shorter essays or book chapters, but I will probably order the following books: Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Cultural Studies; Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture; Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style; Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture; Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader; and Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics.  We may also read at least one longer primary text, such as Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, or Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, along with some shorter works, possibly including science fiction, Sherlock Holmes, and Cthulhu mythos stories; some interactive fiction (probably Emily Short’s “Galatea”); examples of early newspaper comics, including Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and George Herriman’s Krazy and Ignatz; some television (possibly Person of Interest or Sense8); and some music videos.  Essays or book chapters might include works by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Richard Johnson, Meaghan Morris, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Darko Suvin, John Ellis, Laura Mulvey, Richard Dyer, Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Robyn Wiegman, Mark Anthony Neal, Lev Manovich, and Lisa Nakamura.

This course offers an introduction to graduate study in English for entering M.A. and Ph.D. students, with emphasis on the key conversations and debates animating the discipline right now as well as the professional skills and knowledge necessary to succeed on a changing job market. Course content will draw proportionally from the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and language & rhetoric; readings will be both exemplary and representative, covering some of the best and most essential recent work in English, helping us understand how we got here as a discipline, and giving us a roadmap for promising new directions in theory and method that might relate to our scholarly interests. Assignments will be given over to questions of professional development, large and small: What is your subfield and where (e.g. journals, conferences) does it live? Who in our faculty work in your area(s)? How do you formulate a generative research question? What does good academic writing look like? Where do you want your M.A. or Ph.D. to take you?

Black Radicalism, Anti-Colonialism, Marxism, and Communism: literary and critical studies
Instructor:  Laura Chrisman
This course explores the complex interactions of anti-colonial, communist, and Black radical political cultures across the long 20th century. Drawing upon the resources of Marxist and postcolonial studies, this course fuses literary criticism, archival enquiry and critical theory. Under consideration are writers and movements from Europe, continental Africa, the Caribbean, and North America.
Keywords: postcolonial studies; theories of colonialism/anti-colonial nationalism/postcoloniality; Marxism; African studies; socialism; communism; black radicalism; global literatures (1900s-present); postcolonial literatures; Caribbean political culture; African political culture; black diasporic political culture.
List of Books & Readings:
Langston Hughes, selections from The Ways of White Folks [1934] and poetry (1920s-1930s)
Richard Wright, selections from Uncle Tom’s Children [1938]
CLR James, Toussaint Louverture: the story of the only successful slave revolt in history [1934]
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism [1950]
Alice Childress, Gold Through the Trees [1952], in Selected Plays
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun [1958]
Sembene Ousmane, God’s Bits of Wood [1960]
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1963], trans. Philcox
Alex la Guma, A Walk in the Night [1962]
Dionne Brand, Inventory [2006]

 
 
 

Queer and trans studies are grounded in a critique of scientific approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality, which have been historically entangled with scientific racism. This course provides an overview of queer and trans studies scholarship, reading the field through this lens. Together we explore the relations between medicalization, scientific modes of knowing, state and institutional violence, and embodied experience. While the course focuses on scholarship, we also develop analyses of recent and historical scientific writing, reading science as culture. Our analyses develop within the context of a pandemic, so we are attentive to the politics of doubt and the critique of scientific authority. Readings include both recent and canonical work, including texts by Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Katherine McKittrick, C. Riley Snorton, Kyla Schuller, and Jules Gill-Peterson. Students write weekly, low-stake responses. They conclude the quarter by writing either a longer seminar paper or two public-facing essays that draw on course material to analyze an object of their choice.

This course will be based on the premise that transgression—the ostensibly inappropriate crossing of a boundary—is a two-way activity. Whether entailing the invasion of–or the overflow from within—ostensible boundaries and horizons, the case studies we’ll explore situate the transgressive act as inevitably relative to a specific socio-cultural context.  As Thoreau puts it, “it depends on how you are yarded.”  In the nineteenth-century US, one is “yarded” (quite porously, as it turns out) within (or outside of) what we might term a white, Protestant, bourgeois circumference of linguistic codes, social assumptions, standards of bodily beauty, and behavioral norms endlessly subject to contestation, invasion, or leakages.  No doubt in a radically heterogeneous society of truly free exchange and reciprocal respect, much of what occurs in the nineteenth-century US as linguistic, aesthetic and social transgression would assume a much different character.  To call such activity transgressive is to acknowledge (if scarcely to accredit the legitimacy of) hegemonic limits and taboos.  A supplementary issue in this course, however, will be whether some modes which seem transgressive from one perspective escape that label from another.   To what degree do texts which might be labelled “transgressive”actually introduce a massively altered mode of measure into the status quo, in the light of which values are radically altered, the horizon of the normative potentially changes, and ostensibly “transgressive” behavior  undermines the very framework of assumption in which it is seen as such.
Let me emphasize that although it addresses a specific theme, this course is meant to cover a wide spectrum of nineteenth-century U.S. authors, and to study nineteenth-century cultural conditions in sufficient depth to provide students with a solid introduction to this historical period, contestatory, complex and variegated as this “period” no doubt is. Linkages back at least as far British Romanticism, and forward at least as far as Neo-Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Thing Theory will be encouraged.  Background theorists will include Raymond Williams on hegemony, Bakhtin and Geoffrey Harpham on the grotesque, Mary Douglas on filth, dirt, and waste, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on the meaning of transgression from the medieval fair down through the Victorian era, Virgil Nemoianu on theory of the secondary, and Slavoj Zizek on “the Ticklish Subject.” Primary readings will range across a spectrum nineteenth-century American texts; these will include readings in Poe, Frederick Douglass, Melville, Du Bois,  Whittier, Clement Moore, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Stephen Crane.