Course Descriptions 2008-2010

Fall 2008

ENGL 5000: Literature and the Fine Arts, Professor Cedric Reverand

ENGL 5000: Ecocritcism, Professor Harvey Hix

There was once controversy over whether humans are radically altering the environment; now the controversy is over how radical that alteration is, and how humans can address it. Just as that context influences other forms of inquiry--motivating, for instance, scientific inquiry into biodiversity and alternative energy sources-- so it influences literary inquiry. In this course we will work together toward richer and more effective thinking about what literature might mean and what it might do, in a context in which the collective activity of humans threatens the well-being, and possibly even the survival, of the human species.

ENGL 5000: Contemporary American Fiction, Professor Beth Loffreda

ENGL 5010: Practical English: Writing and Literature, Professor Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau

This course introduces new teachers of First Year Composition (FYC) to Writing Studies research and theory so that they can apply to these lessons to their pedagogy, in particular their pedagogy in English 1010. In the beginning of the semester, I assign the readings and class activities. Toward the end of the semester, students will take over this role. Throughout the semester, we will explore together what it means to study, teach, and research various forms of writing common in FYC. I will attempt to connect students' interests with conversations happening within Writing Studies, but in large part this course be shaped by the connections students most compelling.

One note: 5010 is taught while most participants are simultaneously teaching their first UW composition course and taking 5900, a mentoring-based class designed to address issues that arise for first time teachers. 5010 provides the research that can inform your teaching and 5900 provides a hands-on space to hash out issues specific to your class. Clearly these courses are complementary and, I hope, prove useful to new English 1010 teachers at UW.

Spring 2009

ENGL 5000: Texts and Textiles, Professor Susan Frye

In cultures around the world, there exists an implicit connection between texts and textiles, since women have traditionally told stories aloud as well as in domestic design, especially in cloth. Texts and textiles are connected through an underlying philology that describes the ways in which texts are rooted in material production. In English, both "text" and "textile" derive from the Latin texere, to weave, meaning "that which is woven." From the perspective of women's lives, quilting, embroidery, and the knots and patterns of sewing, weaving, and knitting place their workers within narratives of fertility and continuity, and nothing less is at stake at the intersection of the written and visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

This class will begin with the study of the America quilt, in the process viewing films, reading fiction about quilts produced by writers like Alice Walker, and viewing a variety of quilts produced by American women, which were used not only to stay warm, but also to signal people escaping slavery on the Underground Railway. In a course that will offer students the option of writing either critically or creatively (or both) about the texts that we encounter, we will visit museums to view quilts, weaving, and fashion, invite guests with textile expertise, and discuss the implications of the issues surrounding women's self-expression and women's work. Students, who will be invited to contribute to the syllabus, will view a variety of quilts, samplers, needlework, and clothing from the Middle Ages through current times. Other course materials will include films and TV featuring the interconnection of texts and textiles, secondary works about cloth and everyday practice in both western and non-western cultures, and readings that include Alice Walker, Gertrude Stein, Judy Chicago, Lisa Lou, Louisa May Alcott, and Cynthia Ozik.

English 5000: Comics, Comix and the Graphic Novel, Professor Clifford Marx

This course on Comics, Comix, and the Graphic Novel will take an analytical and creative approach to study one of the most important media to emerge in the 21^st century. We will study various genres of this medium, including the Superhero (SpiderMan, Batman, and Watchmen, for example), the graphic memoir (Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home, for example) and graphic fiction (Black Hole, Blankets, and Jimmy Corrigan, for example). While surveying the rich range of comic offerings, we will spend part of our time closely looking at the oeuvre of one artist, perhaps Art Spiegelman. Furthermore, we will combine contemporary critical assessments with each work. Assignments will include keeping a journal for each class, leading one class, and two papers, the second of which will include a significant research component.

ENGL 5000: Perfomring War, Professor Peter Parolin

Performance is an ancient cultural form that might initially seem at odds with war's destructive impulse toward culture. Yet the idiom "theatre of war" reminds us that there may be structural and thematic similarities between the art of performance and the practice of war. Looking at film and theatre, this class will consider the performance of war and issues surrounding war (for starters: dislocation of peoples, war crimes, heroism, national self-assertion, violence against women and children, the debasement of language) to question why war has exercised such a fascination over the practitioners of performance and what these practitioners have hoped to accomplish by representing war in its various guises. Our primary forms of performance will be ancient and contemporary plays and great war films. We will also read literary theory, political and theoretical writing about war, and non-fictional accounts of war that were later adapted for performance. The course will build our sense of the historical relationship between war and performance, which means, among other things, that it will allow us to think about the role and possibilities of performance in our own war-torn contemporary moment. Assignments will include brief response papers on several primary texts; essays on the historical contexts of selected films and plays; leadership of portions of our class discussions; and a more philosophical essay on the nature and purposes of those performances that take war as their subject. Primary texts may include: Aeschylus, The Persians, Burke, Black Watch; Euripides, The Trojan Women; Kubrick Full Metal Jacket; Milestone, All Quiet on the Western Front;Packer, Betrayed; Scott, Black Hawk Down; Shakespeare, Henry V; Sheriff, Journey's End.

ENGL 5310: Literature of the New Republic, Professor Jeanne Holland

In January 1820, the renowned clergyman, wit, and reformed Sydney Smith scoffed in The Edinburgh Review, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" The fledgling nation struggled with a sense of cultural inferioritythat is, when it was not broadcasting its exceptionalism to the rest of the world. This graduate seminar covers American writing from 1790 to 1840. We will investigate how the writing of this tumultuous period engages not only in the creation of an "American" identity and a respectable, distinctive "American literature," but also notions such as nation, virtue, and citizenship. We will examine the intra- and international intrigues and struggles of the new republic to consider how these tensions shapedand were themselves shaped by--the literature of the day. In addition to primary texts, we will read judicious selections from pertinent literary criticism and postcolonial theory. Course requirements include regular attendance and thoughtful discussion participation, frequent analytical writing, an oral presentation, and a final, independent research project.

ENGL 5900: Research Methods, Professor Susan Aronstein

Fall 2009

ENGL 5000: The Disney Discourse, Professor Susan Aronstein

In the 1960s, Richard Schickel wrote: "Disney has succeeded in putting a pair of Mickey Mouse ears on every developing personality in America." In this class, we will examine the myths about America and Americans that accompanied those mouse ears-that we were a nation of dreamers and doers, that science and technology would usher in a "great big beautiful tomorrow," that manifest destiny would march from the frontier (Frontierland and Adventureland) to the stars (Tommorowland). As we do so, we will focus on Disney's visions of the past and the future as arguments about his present, studying the ways in which the Disney discourse was codified,multiplied, and disseminatedduring Walt's lifetime, and capitalized on after his death. We will look at a variety of Disney texts-animated and live action movies, themes parks, television shows, documentaries, speeches and interviews, merchandise-in the context of both their political and historical moment and Disney's real and imagined biography.

ENGL 5000: States/States, Professor Harvey Hix

Depending on context, "state" might refer to a political entity "heads of state convened in Brussels" or to a condition "I'm in a New York state of mind." In this course, we will read various novels in which the protagonist's "state" of being reflects the political "state" in which he/she is a citizen, exploring whether and how the literary convention of correlating the protagonist's internal condition and external conditions sheds light on such issues as self-determination, citizenship, justice, identity, and so on.

ENGL 5010: Practical English: Writing and Literature, Professor Mary P. Sheridan Rabideau

ENGL 5530: Modern Critical Theory, Professor Robert Torry

This class will survey a number of modern and contemporary critical theories, including formalism, psychoanalysis, narratology, post-structuralism, feminist theory and perhaps, post-colonial theory. My interest is in moving toward an understanding of the essential concerns and methods of these approaches, with the understanding that each is derived from a long and complex intellectual and speculative tradition. We will be to so me degree interested in application, but this will not be a cookbook, how to do it class. Rather most of our work will be in the discussion of theory as a complex mode of interpretive thought and the intellectual and political questions theory raises

ENGL 5000: Jane Austen, Professor Eric Nye

In an age of revolution, experimentation, and dissolution of received literary forms, Jane Austen rescued the novel and demonstrated its suitability for the most comprehensive and humane literary purposes. With exquisite craftsmanship she raised the stakes for her nineteenth-century successors in the novel, and her audiences have been faithful ever since. We will examine her antecedents in the eighteenth-century, the complex cultural milieu in which she emerged, and the range of critical opinion she has evoked over the past two centuries. Why are people admitting, today more than ever, that they love Jane Austen?

Spring 2010

ENGL 5000: Men and Monsters, Professor Carolyn Anderson

This course will explore images and creations of the monstrous, and the ways these relate to views of the self. We will read texts ranging from Beowulf to modern film, from triumphalist crusader narratives to vampire movies, from Arabic views of Christian crusaders to Hebrew travelogues, from Renaissance constructions of the other to neo-medievalist Gothic horror. All texts will be in translation, and many will be excerpted in the course packet. I will also place some materials on reserve in the library. We will read various critical theories to help us respond to these primary texts, and discuss changing cultural manifestations of the terrifying, the monstrous, and the other, all in relation to changing inventions of identity. Theories we may discuss include post colonial approaches, queer theory, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and masculine studies.

ENGL 5000: Unclassified, Professors Beth Loffreda and Brad Watson

ENGL 5280: Nineteenth Century British Literature, Professor Caroline McCracken-Flesher

The one thing we know about nineteenth-century Britain is that "they knew who they were, back then." But when was "then"? Who were "they"? Were "they" equally sure? And what was "Britain," anyway? In fact many of the moments and texts we take as markers of a previous certaintyboth literary and conceptualin their own time instanced great anxiety and change. This course pursues nineteenth-century constructions of identity, reaching from what now seem the easy assumptions of Romanticism through the reductive certainties of Victorianism and on to the confusions of Modernism. Along the way, it will consider how these moments are complicated by questions of nation, empire, gender, generation, Darwinism, Evangelicism, industrialism, and the changing modes of public discourse (novels, journals, sixpenny shockers). We will read a range of challenging texts to be vastly entertained and have our assumptions decidedly changed. The nineteenth century will turn our heads inside out. Students should gain all sorts of opportunities and ideas for research and teaching projects within and beyond Nineteenth-Century British Literature.

ENGL 5000: Rhetorics of the Body, Professor Nicole Quackenbush

As rhetorical theorist Jack Selzer notes in his introduction to the collection Rhetorical Bodies, it is only recently that rhetorical scholars have begun to uncover "material, nonliterate practices and realitiesmost notably the body, flesh, blood, and bones" as "legitimate areas of rhetorical scrutiny" (10). Rather than viewing the body as largely "natural" or "neutral"and subsequently somehow arhetoricalthis course will utilize rhetorical theory, gender theory, critical race theory, disability theory and queer theory as a means to examine the ways in which the body is socially constructed and identify and characterize dominant cultural narratives and counter-narratives of the body. We will consider what these narratives have to tell us about the body's relationship to discourse and power, with particular attention to the role the body plays in the rhetorical situation. Primary texts may include: Jack Selzer's anthology Rhetorical Bodies, Shirley Wilson Logan's ‘We Are Coming': The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women, Roxanne Mountford's The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature. As a class, we will "read the body" in both historical and contemporary contexts and work together to identify fruitful areas of inquiry that might include representations of the body in literature, film, case law, medical texts, new media. . .the possibilities are endless. Assignments will include short response papers, the leadership of a class discussion, and a final in-class presentation and seminar paper that will allow students to apply the theoretical frames we have worked with throughout the semester to an "embodied subject" of their choosing. Where appropriate, we may expand our discussion to include an examination of the rhetorical implications of the spaces we inhabit and the material objects we encounter in our daily lives.