Spring 2011
ENGL 5000 St: Novel to Film
What happens when a book is “made into” a film? Why do we so often regard the book
as better, when typically the film has a much larger audience? What narrative
possibilities does the novel offer that film shuts down, and vice versa? We’ll dip our toes
into the critical field of “adaptation studies” by reading various novels and viewing films
made from them, and asking such questions as those. Prerequisite: graduate status or
12 hours of 4000-level work.
ENGL 5250 Stds: Shakespeare
To provide advanced students with the opportunity to study problems of text, sources,
staging, theatrical history, and/or critical theory with reference to the works of William
Shakespeare. Prerequisite: graduate status or 12 hours of 4000-level work.
ENGL 5330 Stds: 20th Century US Literature
This course is designed to help you to get a feel for contemporary American fiction, as
well as some of the recent literary and cultural histories that shape it. The scene of
contemporary fiction is sprawling and rangy; and one of our projects will be to chart the
most agile course that we can between the liberations of incoherence and the rewards
of coherence, between acknowledging that sprawling diversity and making visible some
trends—thematic, formal, cultural—that might make the sprawl mappable. We’ll read a
wide variety of good, challenging stuff along the way, including work that might not
quite be fiction at all, and almost all of it published within the last few years. This course
is also an invitation to you to figure out your posture as a reader and critic: what kind of
reader, what kind of critic, do you want to be? What questions do you want to ask of
literature, and be asked by it? What kind of experiences do you want (and not want)
from literature? You’ll do a substantial amount of writing, and you’ll have the
opportunity to tailor your work for the course depending upon your graduate program
and goals as a writer. Prerequisite: graduate status or 12 hours of 4000-level work.
ENGL 5360 St: Sherman Alexie
A study of literature and culture of selected ethnic minorities. Prerequisite: graduate
status or 12 hours of 4000-level work.
ENGL 5530 Theorizing Culture
Culture, Raymond Williams pointed out, is one of the most complicated words in the
English language. Over the last half-century, debates about culture have become
increasingly important to the study of literature, putting pressure on the complex
relationship between art and the societies in which it is produced and through which it
circulates. What is culture and what is its significance for the study of literature today?
This course offers an immersive introduction to literary theory by focusing on this
crucially important term. Exploring major trends in contemporary literary theory—
including Marxism, critical theory, deconstruction and post-structuralism, feminism and
gender theory, race and post-colonial theory and theories of history—we will consider
some of the significant attempts of the last fifty or so years to understand what culture
is and what role it plays it human life and society. We will focus our study on: defining
culture; the linguistic/cultural turn(s) of the 1940s-60s; popular culture; ideology and
power; subjectivity; space and nation; time, history and critique; and, if time allows,
media theory. Authors studied may include: Burke, Arnold, Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci,
Benjamin, Lacan, Adorno, Barthes, Althusser, de Man, Williams, Fanon, Foucault,
Derrida, Hall, Jameson, Said, Agamben, Haraway, Bhabha, Butler, Hardt and Negri.
Prerequisite: graduate status or 12 hours of 4000-level work.
ENGL 5560 WW: MFA Poetry
(This is a shortened course description; please contact Kate Northrop for a full
description.)
The first book manuscript: it generates much excitement, and much dread. Ann
Lauterbach, judging a first book contest, claimed afterward that she had ingested a large
amount of sticky, sweet gruel. I assume we do not want to write--or read--sticky, sweet,
hot one-pot breakfasts, although neither no I take Ann Lauterbach as the end-all, be-all
authority in the matter.
In designing the course, I have not assumed that each student will be willing or ready or
able to produce a first book manuscript. I have assumed that no matter our personal
goals as writers, we will want to look closer at the work of our peers and the making of
manuscripts -for our own writing, for the depth of our reading. To that end, we will read
first books. We will speak via Skype with authors about their first books and with editors
about their expectations/hopes for first book manuscripts.
Because I do not assume that we all are ready to produce manuscripts or even want to
produce manuscripts, you may move through this course on either of two paths.
1)workshop: workshopping individual poems and/or prose pieces, perhaps with an eye
toward your thesis-to-be 2)manuscript workshop: workshopping poems for a
manuscript (chapbook or full-length collection) during the semester and the entire
manuscript at semester’s end. These students should be working toward submitting this
MS to a contest. Prose writers are welcome and as a means of fulfilling the out-of-genre
requirement, should be willing to adopt for the duration of the semester two aspects of
poetic composition: brevity and compression.
ENGL 5560 WW: MFA Fiction
Workshop members are required to write and turn in for discussion three full-length
short stories, or three chapters or sections from a longer work. Outside reading will
consist of stories chosen by and provided (in terms of copies) from the instructor. Final
material will be a significant revision of one of the workshopped stories or chapters.
Evaluation is based on the quality of original work, class participation (discussion as well
as thoughtful, useful, constructive written and oral critiques of your peers’ work).
Prerequisite: 12 hours of 4000-level creative writing or graduate status.
ENGL 5560 WW: MFA Non-Fiction
The Laramie Atlas Project—Rebecca Solnit Essayist, biographer, journalist and art
historian Rebecca Solnit will lead this class with the express goal of producing a set of
interdisciplinary atlases that will “map” Laramie and the surrounding region in unique
and creative ways. Based upon the “Infinite City” project that Solnit just completed in
San Francisco, this course would be appropriate for writers, scientists, social scientists
and artists who have an interest in designing a new set of atlases for Laramie. The
course will begin with an intensive month-long series of group meetings with Rebecca
Solnit. It will end with an exhibition at the UW Art Museum. In the weeks between, class
participants will be asked to read from a provocative reading list, participate in
graduate-level writing (or art) critiques, and design and produce a series of maps—some
of which may hang on walls and some of which may exist in less traditional forms.
Prerequisite: 12 hours of 4000-level creative writing or graduate status.
ENGL 5000 Gender, Fairy Tales, & Monsters
Gender, Fairy Tales, & Monsters investigates the gender construction in classic fairy
tales & monster stories and their contemporary revisions. Examines the ways in which
gender norms are both subverted and upheld by these genres, and offers tools for
critical analysis thereof. Prerequisite: 12 hours of 4000-level creative writing or graduate
status.
Fall 2011
ENGL 5000 Studies in Modern & Contemporary Poetry
Professor Danielle Pafunda
This course will examine some key lineages, aesthetics, and schools in modern and
contemporary poetry. Looking primarily at US American poets, we'll start with the
moderns and travel out, examining such enclaves as the New York School, the
confessionals, jazz & African-American poets, Oulipo, Black Mountain, the beats,
feminist poetics, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, post-avant, Flarf, gurlesque, and new sincerists to
name a few! We'll read both broadly and deeply as we consider the web of Twentieth
Century poetics, and how that web extends into the Twenty-First Century. The poets
we examine may include, but won't be limited to: Armantrout, Ashbery, Auden, Baraka
(Jones), Berryman, Berssenbrugge, Bidart, Bishop, Brooks, Dove, Duncan, Edson, Eliot,
Ginsberg, Gluck, Guest, Harryman, Hejinian, Howe, Jarrell, Komunyakaa, Lau,
Lauterbach, Levertov, Lowell, Loy, Mac Lowe, Moore, Muldoon, Mullen, Notley, O'Hara,
Olds, Plath, Pound, Powell, Rankine, Scalapino, Sexton, Simic, Snyder, Stein, Stevens,
Toomer, Trinidad, Waldman, Wheeler, Williams, and Zucker. Students will have the
opportunity to trace lineages of their own discovery, choose texts for class, and guide
class discussions. Papers and projects will include reviews, close readings, and creative
applications.
English 5330: Twentieth Century Literature (American Modernism)
Professor Jason Baskin
This course examines the development of American modernism between roughly 1900
and 1960, from its rise of modernism at the turn of the century to its triumph (or,
perhaps, decline) after the Second World War. Is modernism best understood as a
cultural movement united around a specific set of aesthetic principles? Or is modernism
instead a complex (and perhaps even contradictory) series of responses to the historical,
social, technological and political developments of modernity? Foregrounding recent
scholarship that has decisively challenged long-held assumptions about modernism’s
cultural conservatism, highbrow elitism and apolitical aestheticism, we will seek to
relocate modernist writing within the wider cultural context of this period of
unparalleled change and social upheaval. Looking at a variety of works of poetry and
fiction, alongside painting, film and cultural criticism, we will begin by exploring both the
geographical site of modernism’s emergence (the city) and one of modernism’s most
fundamental rhetorical forms (the manifesto). From the foundational innovations of
Henry James and Gertrude Stein, we will then branch out to explore a variety of
modernist literary formations, from high modernism (Pound, Stevens, Eliot, Williams,
Moore) and the Harlem Renaissance (Hughes, Larsen, Cullen, McKay), to regionalist
modernism (Faulkner) and the late modernism of the economically depressed and
politically volatile 1930s (West, Bishop, Greenberg). We’ll conclude with an extended
engagement with Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man in order to gauge the status of
American modernism amidst a new postwar landscape. If time permits, we’ll also
discuss the advent of “postmodernism” and consider the continuing relevance of
modernism at the end of the twentieth century.
English 5360: Race: Medieval to Modern
Professor Carolyn Anderson
What is race? What has it been? We will look at ideas about race from some ancient
texts all the way to the modern era. The course will be organized into modules, where
we consider texts (in translation) from the Greco-Roman world's still influential
categories, to texts from medieval/late antiquity, the Renaissance, the 18th C's
imperialism and colonialism, and finish in the modern era. The modules will center
around race and geography (philosophical notions of civilization and travel), race and
slavery (when and how do they become entangled? in what texts?), and finish with race
and bodies (somatic and behavioral). Texts studied will include some non Western
sources, such as classical/medieval Arabic accounts of the world (Ibn Battuta), the
invention of England, the idea of the nation state, the function of the exotic other as a
controlling device in the Renaissance, the function and practices of 18th C Orientalism
and antiquarianism, and finish with a variety of modern western and non western
materials, such as contemporary texts that deal with race in different political
environments (NZ and Polynesia, First Peoples in Canada, and how race is inextricable
from class and gender in the US and elsewhere).
We will draw on a number of theoretical approaches to discuss these ideas and primary
texts, ranging from post-colonialism, queer theory, annaliste history, critical legal
studies, to Foucauldian analysis of discourse. Students will write a mixture of
presentations during the semester, an annotated bibliography on the topic of your
chosen research, and a final research paper. Students will also be able to select some of
the texts for study. An e-companion course shell will contain excerpted materials, such
as short portions (200-300 lines of poetry or 3-5 chapters of prose) of The Iliad, The
Aeneid, Caesar's Gallic Wars, The Romance of Richard Coer de Lyon (personal
translation), Ibn Battuta's Journey to the Roof of the World (the source of the Arabic
material and perspective in the film, The 13th Warrior), and modern Arabic, Latin
American, and Pasifika short stories. Other texts may include Marlowe's Tamburlaine,
Byron's The Bride of Abydos, Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, Twain's Huckleberry
Finn, selected
Kipling, Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison's The Bluest
Eye, and some films.
ENGL 5560-1: WW:MFA Poetry
This is the poetry writing workshop for MFA candidates. Primarily a studio course
focused on student writing, the class will also include readings taken from the work of a
variety of poets both living and dead. Some readings will be selected by students in the
class, some by me as the instructor. My interests include the social and historical
context within which poetry is written and read. I’m also interested in literary
translation. My lineage as a poet comes from Whitman through Williams to Neruda.
More recent poets whose work has touched me include Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine,
Kim Addonizio, and Adrian C. Louis. Perhaps the class members would like to look at the
work of writers now in their twenties and thirties. We’ll spend time at the beginning of
the course figuring out what the members of the group consider to be most useful for
them in their development as poets.
ENGL 5560-2: WW:MFA Non-Fiction (The Short Form in Non-Fiction)
In this workshop, we’ll explore a weird and wide array of short forms within the genre of
non-fiction. We might most often associate this form with poetry (e.g., haiku, tanka,
and cinquain) and fiction (e.g., micro-, nano- and flash-fiction). But what about the
epitaph, the post card, the recipe, the box score, the report card, the seed packet, the
medicine label, the menu, the obituary, the weather forecast, the wine label, the
headline or the photo caption? How might these forms be understood, adapted,
conscripted, stretched, and twisted to express ideas and experiences? Students will be
encouraged to probe the possibilities and test the limits of the short-form as a means of
opening creative possibilities and expanding (or exploding) assumptions about
seemingly prosaic expressions of our humanity.
ENGL 5560-3: WW:MFA Fiction
For MFA students in any genre. Each week we will read, analyze, enjoy, and critique
stories by MFA program writers in the class and by established writers. Workshop
members will write 3-4 original stories and one revision. Weekly writing will consist of
brief works (250-500 words) that may or may not be inspired by our outside reading.
This weekly work will be story beginnings, fragments, scenes, micros, etc. Novel or
novella chapters are welcome. The writing must be your best, and it must be the work
you feel most challenging to you: no taking the easy path to please yourself or your
peers, much less me. If time (and class size) permits, we will also read stories that have
been made into good movies, and discuss the adaptation(s).
Spring 2012
English 5000: Captivity Narratives
Professor Jeanne Holland
This graduate seminar analyzes the development of America’s first successful literary
export—the captivity narrative. We will trace the evolution and plasticity of this genre
from its earliest English incarnation, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) by
Mary Rowlandson, to Emma Donoghue’s recent best-selling novel, Room (2010).
During our course, in addition to the conventional “white person being taken captive by
a Native American” formula, we will analyze slave narratives, accounts of Native
American children forced to attend governmental boarding schools as well as American
Indians taken captive as adults, prisoner of war autobiographies, stories of American
men being kidnapped into piracy or impressed into naval service, as well as
outrageously fictionalized tales which stretch generic boundaries almost to the breaking
point. As we parse each captivity narrative, we will consider questions of gender,
ideologies, race, class, subjectivity, representation, discourses (and their limitations),
religion, trauma, and nationalism among other pertinent issues related to our primary
texts. REQUIREMENTS: regular class attendance, thoughtful participation, one oral
report, one take-home midterm, several written literary analysis exercises, one literary
analysis essay, an annotated bibliography, and a substantial final research paper.
English 5280: Nineteenth Century British Literature
Professor Eric Nye
Milton’s influence on his successors cannot be ignored. In the eighteenth century the
Miltonic mode dominates forms of poetry and the political commitments of men and
women of letters. But with the coming of the romantics, Milton’s influence shifts. We
will study the profound significance of Paradise Lost for Blake, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge. How do they deal with the anxiety of influence? How do their successors in
the second generation? Are there other, subtler ways that Milton continues to shape
forms of literature less obviously indebted to him? For example, it could be argued that
Jane Austen’s whole career is spent trying to demonstrate the reversibility of malefemale antagonism spawned in Eden. What are the prospects for the restoration of
paradise, of felicity between the sexes? How does Milton help supply the romantics
with visions of integrity, hope, and the literary vocation?
English 5530: Contemporary Critical Theory: Affect Theory: A Cultural History of
Emotion.
Professor Julia Obert
This course serves in part as an introduction to a mode of thought: we will approach
critical theory less as a monolithic ‘discipline’ – a set of “difficult” philosophical texts to
be read, summarized, and set aside at semester’s end – than as an analytical tool that
we can usefully apply in an ongoing way to life and to literature. The course is also a
look into an emerging critical field: affect theory draws on psychology, neurobiology,
cultural studies, and more to try and help us understand that most inscrutable of human
motivations: our feelings. Throughout the semester, we will look at what, exactly,
emotion is, where it comes from, and how it affects our orientations towards the world.
We will also examine emotion historically (why did the Victorians consider “hysteria” a
viable medical diagnosis?) and culturally (why are different ‘feeling-states’ variously
valued and regulated by different cultural groups?), ultimately coming to understand
affective encounters, at least in part, as socially constructed experiences. We will read a
series of key theoretical texts over the course of the semester, and will also apply their
(and our) insights to literature, film, and other cultural phenomena (the intensity of
feeling inspired by, say, Obama’s election or the prospective building of the Islamic
Cultural Center in New York). The course serves as a useful introduction to the kinds of
theoretical work you will likely encounter throughout graduate school.
English 5870: Feminist Methodologies
Professor Mary P. Sheridan
This course introduces you to common methods (e.g., archival research; discourse
analysis; interviews; ethnography) used to examine textually-mediated research
projects. Within this overview, we will investigate what makes certain methods feminist
ones.
Likely questions that will ground this course include: How do we determine viable and
responsible research projects? What are ethical considerations of representation, of
both living participants and dead subjects? How do we limit the contexts in which we
frame our research? How do we negotiate our relationships with our participants? Our
institutions? And our field?
Likely texts include a course packet as well as Gesa E. Kirsch’s Ethical Dilemmas in
Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Identification and Publication; Nancy Naples’
Feminism & Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research; Eileen E.
Schell and K.J. Rawson’s Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and
Methodologies.
English 5880: “‘Stop the Presses’: Digital Poetics and the Future of Literary
Scholarship”
Professor Andy Fitch
In classic American films, a newspaper reporter screams “Stop the presses!” whenever
he or she comes across an urgent, unexpected story. In this course we will examine one
of the most urgent stories to hit contemporary literary practice: a story concerning the
impact that digital databases, web-based journals and computer-generated critical
discussions have on whom we read, how we study, and which media we deem worthy
of scholarly attention. “Stop the Presses” will focus on the field of 20 th/21st-century
experimental poetry—in order to ask broader questions about how we absorb, analyze,
classify and preserve literary texts. We will expand the conception of a poetic text by
treating audio- and video-recordings of live poetic performances as accessible, primarysource documents. We will explore connections between twenty-first century poetry,
art, music, dance and film by perusing digital databases from each of these disciplines.
We will survey the leading digital publications available to contemporary poets,
students and scholars, and we will study recent literary works designed through
computer-based compositional techniques.
ENGL 5560-1: WW:MFA Poetry
This is the poetry writing workshop for MFA candidates. Primarily a studio course
focused on student writing, the class will also include readings taken from the work of a
variety of poets both living and dead. Some readings will be selected by students in the
class, some by me as the instructor. My interests include the social and historical
context within which poetry is written and read. I’m also interested in literary
translation. My lineage as a poet comes from Whitman through Williams to Neruda.
More recent poets whose work has touched me include Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine,
Kim Addonizio, and Adrian C. Louis. Perhaps the class members would like to look at the
work of writers now in their twenties and thirties. We’ll spend time at the beginning of
the course figuring out what the members of the group consider to be most useful for
them in their development as poets.
ENGL 5560-2: WW:MFA Non-Fiction
ENGL 5560-3: WW:MFA Fiction
In Narrative Design, his classic text for writers, Madison Smartt Bell asserts that linear
design in fiction is primarily “subtractive, a process of removing the less essential
material so as to reveal narrative….” Other forms of design, however, are, to Bell’s mind
primarily “additive.” This course will be conducted as a traditional writing workshop
with discussion of student work at its center. But we will also spend time thinking about
what it means to “add” or “subtract” elements from prose and poetry. We will consider
writing by Gertrude Stein, Alain Robbe-Grillet, William T. Vollman, Anne Carson and
others. We may also consider the effects of “addition” and “subtraction” in other
media. Students will be asked to complete a few small assignments related to the
theme of the class. Weekly discussions of reading assignments will also be led by
students. Pre-requisite: Admission to the MFA Program in Creative Writing or
permission of the instructor.