German 580: Acted Over: Staging Revolution

Performances of revolution confront us with the specter of both literary and historical structures of repetition. Marx casts this problem as a generic one in which history appears twice: “first as tragedy, then as farce.” In this course, we’ll explore these questions of genre and politics in theatrical (and theatrically inflected) representations of the French and Haitian revolutions. Texts available in translation; discussion in English.

C LIT 424 A: The Epic Tradition

In this course you will encounter some very old tales: the traditional, heroic epics that for centuries served, and still serve, as a way for people to create a legendary past for themselves, to define themselves, transmit values that are important to them, and to connect the past to present and future. We will focus on traditional tales passed down orally from one generation to the next and visit many times and places, from the ancient Near East, Greece, and India, to medieval Central Asia and Europe. We will read, in whole or in part, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Tain Bo Cualnge. We will also take a brief look at epic tales from Turkic and Slavic traditions (brief because there is no suitable English translation available to read them fully). The goal is to get a sense of what these epics are and how much more there is to explore.

Although it is listed as an upper-level, this course is very much open to students at all levels, including freshmen, and of all majors. No previous familiarity with the epics we’ll read is assumed or required. But: you will learn a lot even if you have read some of these poems before! Please be prepared for a substantial amount of reading.

TEXTS:

The Epic of Gilgamesh, by Andrew George. Penguin Classics; Reissue edition(April 29, 2003).
The A New Translation. By Caroline Alexander. Ecco 2016.
The Odyssey, Homer. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, introduction by Carne-Ross. Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. 1998. OR: Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson. Norton 2017.
The Mahabharata: a shortened modern version of the Indian Epic. Translated by R.K. Narayan, foreword by W. Doniger.
Ramayana, Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic. Translated by R. K. Narayan. Penguin Books 2006.
The Tain: Translated from the Irish Epic Tain Bo Cuailnge by Thomas Kinsella. Oxford University Press 2002.

Note: I generally allow the use of other translations in class but there are exceptions, so please run it by me first.

DANCE 545 A: Contemporary Dance History

Examines the development of social and performance-based dance from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present with particular emphasis on major international stylistic trends, cultural influences, and principal artists and their work.

DRAMA 572 A: Emerging Discourses in Theatre/Performance Studies

Syllabus Description:

Drama 572: Emerging Discourses in Theatre/Performance Studies

This course is an opportunity for participants to become conversant in some of the discourses that are informing current work in our field. Together we’ll put a finger on the pulse of contemporary scholarship and take a closer look at and assess some of the scholarly trends that have found a place at the table. This quarter, these include Ecocritical Theory, Cognitive Sciences, and approaches informed by Affect Theory.

Methods and techniques of research, interpretation, and writing in theatre history. Relationship of theatre arts to culture in diverse periods and places.

DRAMA 582 A: Performance Ethnography

This course engages Black aesthetics, staging dialogues between Black art practices and aesthetic theories, with What are the methods for observing, engaging, and embodying culture? How does the lens of performance — as embodied action, practice, and repertoire — deepen methods attentive to aesthetics, expressive cultures, sensorium, and geography?

These questions root this course on performance ethnography, which aligns ethnography — the method of studying culture (often through observation, fieldwork, and interviews) — with the interdisciplinary lens of performance. Readings cover ethnographic methods (including critical, dance, and performance ethnography), and include ethnographic texts that consider performance in dialogue with geography, race, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and form, as well as ethics.

Throughout the course, students will practice ethnographic methods (including observation, writing field notes, conducting interviews, documenting sensorium, and staging embodied performance) in support of a final ethnographic research paper.

AH 400/525 Contesting the Status Quo: Art and Social Action since 1960

If we accept Webster’s most encompassing definition of politics as “the total complex of relations between people in a society,” then in some sense all art is political. That is to say, all art takes a stand—or is positioned by interpreters so that it does—in relation to the dominant values of its time. Since the 1960s, however, one might say that artists have become particularly conscious of the political resonances of their art. Amidst a general climate of social unrest and direct action, from the civil rights movements in the early sixties to the momentous events of 1968, the emphasis of many artists increasingly shifted from aesthetic to sociopolitical concerns. Rather than present a broad survey of this trend, this class will examine several of the most significant, self-conscious politics of artistic production from the 1960s to the present. Though a great deal of the class material will be presented in lecture format, discussion will be encouraged at all times. Although no previous art history experience is required, some familiarity and interest in contemporary art, history, politics, and/or critical theory is recommended.

GERMAN 421 A: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Between 1750 and 1830, German playwrights created some of the most memorable characters on the modern theatrical stage, such as Lessing’s Minna or Goethe’s Faust. They adapted classical myths and dramatized history in new ways. Their goal was to establish a text-based theater for educating the audience and creating new forms of aesthetic community. They distanced themselves both from the lavish court spectacles of the time as well as the popular marketplace shows of the itinerant actors’ troupes.

In this course, we will examine the German and Viennese theater of the long 18^th century, the so-called Goethezeit, focusing our attention on five major playwrights and plays: Goethe’s Faust I; Schiller’s Maria Stuart; Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, Grillparzer’s Medea (from the trilogy Das goldene Vliess) and Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte. We will ask how these “very serious jokes” (Goethe’s term for his Faust) may continue to entertain and engage us today.

Annotated versions of the plays are available to help with the readings in German. Class discussion will be in German or English, depending on the linguistic preparation of the group. Required preparation: German 203. Recommended level of preparation: German 301, 302 or 303. Course requirements: Class participation, oral presentations, critical journals, midterm and final-exam essay.

ENGL 599 A: Special Studies in English

This course in professionalization for English and humanities graduate students is intended to make the academic imperative to “publish or perish” less daunting and to assist students as they begin building their career dossier. Participants will start with a substantial piece of writing—a seminar paper from a previous class, for instance—and will develop over the course of 10 weeks two potential publications: one for an academic journal and one for a venue with a non-academic readership. The instructor, Jeff Knight, will lead participants through a series of workshops, some with invited guests, and participants will gain hands-on experience in academic publishing at the journal Modern Language Quarterly, which is housed at UW. Class meetings will cover questions such as: what are the pros and cons of publishing in scholarly versus non-academic venues? How are different kinds of publications weighted in the academy? How does peer-review work and why is it so highly valued? How can you improve the chances that your work will be accepted for publication? What should your CV look like? What conferences should you attend and when? Where are the funding opportunities and how do you position yourself for fellowships, grants, or other awards?

ENGL 555 A: Feminist Theories

This course takes up the question of how feminist theorists return to earlier work (that of other feminist theorists and sometimes their own) and in so doing revise their understanding of the central questions that animate feminism in order to envision critique—of power, political economy, governmentality, binaries of gender and sex, racial formations, subjectivity, epistemology, and what has ubiquitously come to be referred to as “intersectionality.” Put otherwise, the course explores re/vision as a feminist theoretical method and political praxis that articulates (in the sense of joins) theory and politics, and elaborates (in the sense of expands and expounds) feminism as a sociocultural and sociopolitical project across time.

Students interested in feminist theory will gain from this course a deepened understanding of feminist engagements starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s through to the present–though this course is not in any way designed as a survey of Second and Third Wave feminism (is such a course possible?) or as a canon building exercise meant to cement the centrality of particular feminist “classics” or “foundational” feminist texts. Rather, the course has a twofold aim: 1) to return to particular, often widely read feminist writings, now historical, and to inhabit or sit with these writings long enough to appreciate their complex mediation of the context in which they were written and thus the questions (and sometimes events) into which they sought to intervene; and, 2) to understand how feminist contributions built out of feminist revision both expand upon and also potentially foreclose what the revised, earlier texts offer. In short this course offers neither a progress narrative nor an account of successive waves but instead a portrait of intellectual and political complexity. Overall, as we move through the arc of the course we will seek to build an expressly genealogical understanding of a select group of debates and questions that have animated feminist theory over the last 40 years and that bring us into our present feminist moment. In this way, we will seek to understand where, when, and how particular feminist thinkers entered the ongoing discussion decades ago, how ongoing debates have unfolded (or, perhaps, have been dropped or disavowed), and how our apprehension of feminist theoretical production is always necessarily conditioned by the circumstances in which we receive it, the demands we make on it, and, therefore, by the political urgencies of the present.

ENGL 510 A: History of Literary Criticism and Theory IV

The study of literature and culture today is vastly different from what it was forty years ago. In the 70s and 80s a revolution in thought took place, beginning with poststructuralism and deconstruction and followed by new historicism and a variety of other new approaches. Contemporary ways of approaching literature and culture are rooted the preceding wave of postructucturalism and deconstruction, and are only superficially understood without an understanding of that preceding wave. This course is intended to provide the necessary background. We will begin with a quick survey of the metaphysical and literary critical ideas that the structuralists were trying to “deconstruct,” ideas that came to be lumped together as “humanism” and “essentialism.” Everybody today knows (whether implicitly or explicitly) that essentialism is wrong, but unless you know exactly what essentialism is, in all its complexity, you can’t know exactly in what ways it’s wrong, or understand that there are valid as well as invalid uses of essentialism (and by valid ways I don’t just mean “strategic essentialism”). That’s why we’ll start with the grandfather of essentialism, Aristotle. After surveying the background texts, we’ll turn to the beginnings of “social constructionism” in the work from the 1920s of V. N. Volosinov (a member of the “Bakhtin circle”), and then to the major figures of the structuralist revolution from the 70s and 80s.

You will need to buy Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Lacan’s Écrits; the rest of your readings will be in a course packet at EZ Copy, 4336 University Way (“the Ave”), print@ezcopy.net, 206-632-2553.

Reading schedule:

Backgrounds:

Aristotle, selections from Poetics Sept 26, Oct 2

Wordsworth, brief extracts from the Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” Oct 1

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” Oct 1

Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (from The Well-wrought Urn) Oct 3

Stucturalism and deconstruction:

Volosinov, “Verbal Interaction,” from Marxism and Linguistic Philosophy Oct 8, 10

Foucault, “What is an Author?” Oct 15, 17, 22

Derrida, selections from Of Grammatology Oct 24, 29, 31, Nov 5

Stanley Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” Nov 7

Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” Nov 12, 14

Lacan, selections from Écrits Nov 19, (no class Nov 21), 26, 28

Dec 4 and 6: open. We’ll decide how to use this time later in the quarter.