Winter 2023 Course Descriptions

100-Level English Courses

ENG 100 Intro to College Writing 5cr

CRN: 13081 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-1:00 pm Instructor: Lucchesi, Andrew

This course provides an intensive workshop in college-level writing skills. We will use writing as a tool for understanding complex ideas, for making new knowledge, and generally for getting stuff cone at college.

This class offers only a few seats each year, giving students a personal connection to both the instructor and to their classmates. We will focus on how to read and respond to complex texts and how to compose pieces of writing in multiple forms, including essays, reports, proposals, websites, and slide presentations. Students will leave this class with the flexibility and confidence to succeed in their future writing-intensive classes.

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU

Prerequisites Notes: May not be taken concurrently with ENG 100. GUR: ACOM.

A writing course designed to prepare students for college-level creative, critical, and reflective writing. Because writing looks and works differently in different contexts, this course teaches the rhetorical competencies that students need to write across multiple disciplines. The course introduces students both to the processes of building and analyzing ideas, and to ways of communicating those ideas in context-specific genres for targeted audiences. This course has the immediate goal of preparing students to succeed in their writing at Western, but it will also serve them personally and professionally. Students needing to satisfy Block A of the communications section of the General University Requirements, which ENG 101 does, are required to do so prior to completion of 45 credits. Students with a 4 or 5 AP score are encouraged to take this class so they can learn to adapt their test-taking skills to college coursework.

OVERRIDES / CAPACITY OVERRIDES ARE NEVER GRANTED FOR ENGLISH 101.

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 WritinHumanit: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or 4/5 AP English Language Exam. Restricted to Freshmen and Sophomores until Monday, Nov 21st at 10am.

CRN: 14060 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Hannah Carlson

Women in Sport
In this research and writing class, we will explore what it means to locate and contribute to an ongoing conversation in the broad field of Women in Sports. We will consider questions such as: To what extent do sports act as mirror and magnifier of the human condition? What impact have women had on sports and what impact have sports had on women? The course includes smaller writing and reading assignments as well as, two larger projects. The exploratory project with in-class presentation is due around week 6 and the research and inquiry paper wraps up the quarter. No experience in athletics required, just your own questions and curiosity!

CRN: 10690 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Sophia Brauner

QueerVisualTexts
In this research and writing course, we will focus on representations of gender and sexuality in visual texts. We encounter visual texts daily—on social media platforms, coffee shop menus, or this website you’re engaging with right now! Visual texts evoke more than just aesthetic pleasure; they also shape the way we understand the spaces in which we move. In other words, visual texts tell us a lot about diverse human experiences.

We’ll engage with a variety of visual texts from paintings, memes, YouTube videos, protest signs, and Instagram posts. The class consists of two major projects: a cumulative portfolio and a critical inquiry essay. In both projects you will put your own spin on our course’s inquiry questions: How do different types of visual texts function as community building, identity exploration, resistance, and protest for the LGBTQIA+ community? How are visual texts used to express and negotiate sexuality and gender? What do visual depictions of sexuality and queerness communicate about different lived experiences? Which new understandings of writing emerge by analyzing and interpreting visual texts?

The course combines creative and critical inquiry work with thinking and writing practices for college and beyond. Whether your personal and academic interests lie inside or outside the Humanities, you will encounter visual rhetoric in any academic and professional field. No prior knowledge of gender and sexuality studies or visual rhetoric/design required. All texts will be available on Canvas.

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. BCOM.

CRN: 10061 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony

This course directs attention to where literature and madness overlap by
examining texts that either include characters experiencing hallucinations
or texts that claim to produce madness. We will inquire into the differences
between madness, weirdness and that which is yet to be articulated and
made habitual.

• Clark, P. Djeli. Ring Shout
• Rivers, Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan
Snipes, The Deep
• Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft,
Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird
• A People’s Future of the United States

CRN: 10186 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Patterson, Dayna

Emily Dickinson once wrote to a friend that if after reading a book, “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Franz Kafka asserted, “Books must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Audre Lorde called poetry “a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change.” In this course we will ask some answerable as well as some unanswerable questions. What is literature? How does it work? What happens when we read it? Why do we love it or hate it? What does it have to do with our experiences of living? What does it have to do with large social and political forces? How do we construct our opinions about it, about the things that happen within it? How can we speak to each other productively about it? How can we analyze it and make arguments about it? In pursuit of answers, we will read widely across short fiction and poetry. And we will write regularly: formal analyses and essays as well as drafts, explorations, experiments, lists, responses, and questions.

CRN: 10510 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy

Good stories give us a lot to talk about. But while we spend a lot of time talking, we seldom think about the wonderful gift of being able to write about these forms of literature, when in fact writing about literature is fundamental to what English majors do. This class will provide you with the skills you need to excel: identifying topics for analysis, developing ideas, revising drafts, performing research, and even enjoying the whole process. As an added bonus, you’ll get to read some great literature, too.

CRN: 10691 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon

This section of Eng 202 uses Making Arguments About Literature: A Compact Guide and Anthology as central reference and text. To give the course an emphasis for discussion and writing, we will explore the early work of James Joyce: Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. All 3 texts are required, and other required readings and texts will be made available in class and on Canvas.

CRN: 10692 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Teer, Kaitlyn

Dear students, in this research and writing course, we will practice close reading and critical analysis of epistolary (from the Latin "epistula" for "letter") works of literature and write personal, creative, and academic responses to these texts.

We will read a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—all written as letters. We'll trace the literary history of the poem-as-letter and read contemporary poets, including those who exchange poems as correspondence. Likewise, we'll examine the circulation of historical and contemporary nonfiction epistles, including sub-genres such as the open letter and the advice letter as well as letters that figure prominently in literary activism. We'll also read novels written in letter form.

Though I expect you will bring your own research interests and perspectives to these texts, I anticipate that some of the questions we will explore together will have to do with audiences and publics and the circulation of texts; how we conceptualize public and private, personal and political forms of communication; the effects of second person, direct address; and the intimacy afforded by the epistolary form.

Through reading, discussing, writing, and revising, you will build analytical skills and develop a critical essay rooted in your own responses to our questions about these texts. Won't you join me? Sincerely, Kaitlyn Teer

CRN: 10693 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

A writing course designed to help students develop the skills of close reading and careful analysis of literary texts, with particular attention to how language, style, and form contribute to a text’s social or political claims. Introduces students to the challenge of situating themselves in relation to a literary text and the critical conversation about that text, and crafting multi-draft critical essays with a focused, arguable thesis supported by thoughtful sequence of claims and carefully selected textual evidence.

CRN: 14161 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

ENG 203 Wrtg for Public&Prof Audiences 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. CCOM.

CRN: 13095 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael

English 203 is designed to provide you with instruction and practice in the creation of highly effective documents custom-tailored to specific professional and public audiences and their functional contexts. Writing in this field is focused on the uses that readers put to texts, readers who are reading to make decisions, choose actions, or accomplish tasks. Audience-centered writers are therefore experts in rendering complex information in clear terms that their readers can understand. A skilled professional writer is able to accurately determine the specific requirements of a target audience, making careful selection and presentation of information for specific effect. Such writers present complex information with impeccable organization and clarity across many different kinds of documents: letters, reviews, reports, proposals, and presentations among them.

Successful audience-centered writers must be excellent researchers and fast-learners. Increasingly, such writers must also be excellent visual designers, with a solid grasp of the effects of graphics and layout on reader response. In the 21st century, the production of text for professional and public audiences lies within the realm of design: writers for these audiences are document designers.

Assignments will comprise both solo and group projects, for a variety of audiences/contexts.

ENG 216 American Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: HUM.

CRN: 13825 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

CONTENT: This course focuses on a variety of writing from the nineteenth-century United States, a racially charged period in which authors practiced resistance, outrage, entertainment, struggle, and deception in their work. We will read, analyze, interpret, and discuss a wide range of texts by writers of different race/ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and other identity markers.

ASSIGNMENTS & EVALUATION:
Requirements include exams, quizzes, lots of reading, and lots of thinking.

TEXTS:
Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume B
Selected Writings of Ella Higginson

ENG 227 Queer Literature

Notes & Prerequisites: BCGM.

CRN: 12528 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Guess, Carol

This course serves as an introduction to contemporary American LGBTQ+ literature. We’ll begin with an overview of LGBTQ+ history, then examine recent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction through the lens of shifting paradigms of sexuality and gender. Requirements include five short essays and one group presentation.

ENG 238 Society through its Literature

Notes & Prerequisites: HUM

CRN: 12650 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

Consent in Literature and Society
The concept of consent can be found in every culture and can be traced back to the earliest literary traditions. In this course, we will start with a broad sweep, tracking ways consent has been understood in literature and society, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the work of Boccaccio to the Shelleys. We’ll aim to understand different forms of consent, including consent of the governed, medical consent, sexual consent, digital consent, etc. We will also look at how asymmetrical power relations, such as those organized via race, gender, coloniality, and social class, can erode the conditions that make consent possible. We will explore consent in advertising, including the concept of “the manufacture of consent,” and we will watch and analyze at least two related films: Citizen Kane (1941) and No (2012). We will also look at some ways consent has been discussed in Cultural Studies, emerging from Gramsci’s theorization of ‘consent’ in his Prison Notebooks. Briefly dipping into literary analog games and transmedia, we will look at ways the Nordic Larp movement and ARGs challenge and expand understandings of consent, while exploring the emergence of “consent mechanics” that are used to moderate some forms of interactive literature. We will also have a chance to look at literary works coming out of the movement for 'consent economics,' including the works of Cadwell Turnbull and Margaret Killjoy, before turning to Indigenous-settler relations, with a focus on the local Fish Wars and the denial of treaty rights based on forms of ‘colonial unknowing’ that leverage fantasy to dismantle the conditions for consent.

ENG 239 Latina/o Literatures 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: BCGM.

CRN: 13826 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

Analysis, interpretation and discussion of a range of texts in English and in translation by Latina/o authors.

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg Stds: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior status; or instructor permission. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4:30pm.

CRN: 10335 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Celaya, Anthony

Community Storytelling

We are hardwired for stories. Whether the stories are drawings on cave walls, orations told for generations, machine printed for the masses, or streamed to our phones. Stories are powerful. We engage with stories for numerous reasons: to learn about the world, to escape, to live vicariously, to relax, to be thrilled. Stories also have the power to shape our perceptions of ourselves and others. Recent conversations about representation in stories has shown how important it is for our stories to be told, especially for people from underrepresented groups.

In this course, we will learn, practice, and implement qualitative research methods and skills to conduct narrative inquiry projects (Kim, 2016). You will develop a research plan and conduct interviews within a community of your choice to share the stories of the community that need to be told and ultimately preserved. This quarter, we will work to address the following questions:

• How do we ethically and respectfully work with community members?
• How do we learn about the rich, beautiful, and important stories within a community?
• How do we honor communities with the sharing of their stories?

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior status. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4:30pm.

CRN: 10319 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael

In this section of English 302 you’ll develop your skill in generating reader-centered documents that work: documents that do things as well as say things, performing specific functions for specific kinds of readers. Given that so much of our culture now communicates and conducts its business in the visual realm, your work in the course will be focused as much on document design as written language. Through this work you will gain an understanding of how all the elements of a document work together to communicate within specific contexts, for specific audiences.

English 302 is not simply a skills-acquisition course however. We will use technical communication as a field in which to conduct analytic inquiry appropriate to study in the humanities. This quarter the analytic component of the course will take us into a study of games and the culture surrounding them: both table-top and video games. As a student of the course, you will be collaborating with other students on a series of documents, presentations, and prototypes leading to the development of an original tabletop game. The design of your game will be based in part on contemporary game studies and critiques. Every stage of this inquiry will generate documents in accord with the guidelines of effective technical and professional communication. (And yes, we will be playing games in class!)

You will emerge from the course with the ability to respond effectively to the requirements of technical communication. You will also have a complex understanding of what is becoming a vital aspect of our contemporary culture.

CRN: 10369 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel

English 302 addresses the essential elements of technical writing—or writing in action. My underlying objective for English 302 is to explore the power of language to change people, events, and self. We’ll explore ways to use writing skills to accomplish personal, professional, and ideological goals. In the process, we’ll also consider the use of humor, empathy, ethics, and storytelling in technical writing.

CRN: 10415 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

English 302 is the English department’s introductory 300-level workshop course in technical writing. It is for juniors and seniors. It is a 5-credit writing proficiency course. English 302 emphasizes the writer-reader relationship in a variety of nonacademic writing situations. Students learn to identify their audience, develop objectives, organize the content of their documents and revise documents for readability. Students write and design a resume, letters, memos, a proposal, a formal report, an infographic, and a visual presentation. Students also learn to work in small breakout groups, collaborate on writing, and give peer feedback. The final project in this course is a professional portfolio which provides examples of your strongest work. When you have completed this course, you should be ready to write in the professional world.

CRN: 10465 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael

CRN: 10521 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon

Students engage with the rhetorical and technical practices for creating artifacts that help people do things with technology, such as usability testing, screencasting, web authoring, document design, and information architecture. The course covers a variety of technical genres and focuses on the ethical and social implications of a technical writer's choices.

11155 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 307 if you have taken ENG 307 or ENG 317. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Nov 10th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Nov. 14, at 10:00am.

CRN: 12294 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy

Knights! Dragons! Churches! Really good gravy! The literature of the Middle Ages is diverse and fascinating, ranging from the silly to the sublime, the enlightening to the enigmatic, the humorous to the holy. Far from being stiff and boring, medieval literature is filled with adventure, excitement, and the ongoing quest to understand the human condition. The songs, stories, and tales of this period of history continue to exert their influence today, in works like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and even Game of Thrones - and it all begins with English 307.

Text: The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Literature

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 308 if you have taken ENG 308 or ENG 318. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Nov 10th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Nov. 14, at 10:00am.

CRN: 11388 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Modality: Hybrid (MW: F2F, F: online synchronous)

Faking it: Disguise and Dissimulation in the Early Modern Atlantic

In the courts of early modern Europe, the ability to hide one’s true intentions was necessary to maintain or gain power. Baltasar Gracián’s seventeenth-century book of advice for courtiers explains that the prudent man “never does what he seems to have a mind to doe. He takes an aim, but that is to deceive the Eyes that look upon him. He blurts out a word in the air, and then does a thing that no body dreamt of.”

This course examines a disciplinary discourse on dissimulation that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to teach princes, courtiers, and eventually society at large how to disguise their most intimate thoughts and emotions in the interest of political gain. But dissimulation was just as much about using one’s own body to disguise the truth as it was about claiming the ability to exercise judgment and power over the bodies of stigmatized others. Texts about dissimulation also construct systems of social differentiation based on race and class. In this seminar, we read texts about dissimulation with the goal of uncovering social operations the texts themselves often work to disguise. Authors may include Baldassare Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and others. By the end of the course, you will be able to discuss some key terms in affect studies, perform metatextual analyses, and demonstrate skills in working collaboratively to develop generative research questions about early modern literature.

Students will be responsible for completing 20-50 pages of reading before most class meetings, writing regular reading response posts, composing two short close reading papers, contributing to a collaborative annotated bibliography, and creating a proposal for a research paper.

CW: This course engages histories of sexual, gendered, religious, and racialized violence. We will prioritize caring for each other and for the language we read and produce together.

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 310 if you have taken ENG 309 or ENG 319. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Nov 10th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Nov. 14, at 10:00am.

CRN: 11389 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

CONTENT: This courses focuses on the time period that scholars have recently named the long eighteenth century—that is, the era that extends from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. These are such dynamic years in the literature of what becomes the United States. We will read literary works by people of various races, ethnicities, religions, and economic positions that explore vital issues of the day such as liberty, literacy, revolution, and science. We will examine the various ways in which a dominant rich male Whiteness is challenged as America and American identities are formed and defined.

ASSIGNMENTS: In this course you will write both extensively and intensively, producing multiple drafts of papers, revisions, and finished essays. We will devote class time for instruction and practice in disciplinary research methods and writing strategies. Students will write short responses to the reading, shorter essays, and one twelve-page critical research paper that engages with current scholarship on an eighteenth-century text or texts assigned for class. Much reading, writing, and thinking will be asked of you, along with steady attendance, a participation grade, group work, and various out-of-class assignments.

TEXT: Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume A

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 310 if you have taken ENG 310 or ENG 320. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Nov 10th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Nov. 14, at 10:00am.

CRN: 11390 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

Resisting Narratives

CONTENT: In this course we’ll explore a variety of texts created by women in North America during the long 19th century. Each of the texts challenges traditional narratives, resisting not only genre expectations but also broader cultural assumptions and structures. Many of the texts give agency and voice to marginalized women, providing – to borrow bell hooks’ words – ways to subversively claim space that normally excludes them. We’ll consider different types of media in addition to writing, such as scrapbooks, embroidery, samplers, recipes, and quilts.

ASSIGNMENTS: Assigned reading; discussion presentation; short writing responses; final multi-media project.

TEXTS: may include the writers Sui Sin Far, Zitkala-Ša, Harriet Jacobs, Louisa May Alcott, Rose Terry Cooke, Fanny Fern, Pauline Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson, as well as examples of scrapbooks, samplers, embroidery, recipes, and quilting.

ENG 311 Seminar: The 20-21st Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 311 if you have taken ENG 311 or ENG 321. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Nov 10th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Nov. 14, at 10:00am.

CRN: 11391 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

Games as Literature: Exploring Interactive Narrative Media
In this class we will explore literary games, as well as relevant critique and narrative theory. While this course will include some gameplay and gamemaking, much of your work will entail reading and writing literary critique. Digital games will make an appearance, but we will largely be focused upon analog game genres, including keepsake games, tabletop games, and larps–with an eye to movements and schools of larp. We will also explore some forms of transmedia and e-lit, including locative media, netprov, and ARGs, as we strive to enrich our understandings of, and distinguish between, genre-platforms of interactive media. Our work will be informed by feminist analog game studies, critical game studies, and decolonial interventions into game design.

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10084 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony

Pre-Socratic to 19th Century

An exploration of theory and criticism from the Pre-Socratics to the 19th Century.

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 12651 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

Want to think about how we construct identities? Why gender, sexuality, and race matter? Why texts are political? How capitalism, immigration, and climate change are related? How power is embedded within our institutions and practices? And how to create meaningful change within our communities and the broader world? This class will utilize critical and cultural theories to help us think about literary texts and methodologies--as well as engage the pressing issues of our day. We will do so through so a wide range of readings and examples from contemporary culture.

The course will begin by providing an overview of structuralist and post-structuralist literary and critical theories, from Ferdinand de Saussure’s insights about language as a sign system to N. Katherine Hayles’ analysis of cognitive assemblages and Bruno Latour’s work on politics and climate change. We will engage a full range of readings and media selections from post-Marxism; new materialism/object-oriented ontology; eco-criticism/Anthropocene; feminism, gender and sexuality studies; disability studies; critical race theory; post-colonialism; and Indigenous knowledge systems. Course questions and themes will investigate the embodied perspectives we assume in the material world and how these perspectives shape our reading and writing practices as well as our behavior, generally. The digital context in which we find ourselves necessitates our thinking about our relationship to “things” and “machines” as well as peoples and cultures. And the current climate crisis requires us to think about the relationship of all systems and networks, including those involving non-human animals, geological processes, and inanimate objects. By the time you’ve completed this course, you will be able to identify the ideological perspectives and inherent biases embedded within texts, whether written, spoken (aural), or visual; and you will understand how to use critical thinking to inform your agency and advocacy in the larger, civic world.

Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd edition), Leitch, Cain, Finke, et al.
A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2nd edition), Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan

Assignments
Course work will include the assigned readings, participation in class discussions, and theory blogs (where you work with various prompts and pair a text of your choice with a specific theory, analyzing the possibilities that unfold from their mutual interrogation of one another).

Evaluation
Course evaluation will be determined by theory blogs (80%) and class participation (20%).

CRN: 12652 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lee, Jean

Intro to Theory

This course is an introduction to literary theory, which are writings that speak to underlying principles of language, knowledge, culture, and literature. While literary theory often draws from other fields, such as linguistics, social sciences, psychology, feminist and queer studies, and political economics, literary criticism, or the analysis of literary works (authors, genres, movements) is enriched by the interdisciplinary reach of theory. Importantly, literary theory provides the tools for literary scholars to be self-reflective about their assumptions and approaches to interpreting culture. Literary texts are also rich artifacts out of which theory is born, as literature reflects social and cultural dynamics and processes. Throughout this quarter, you will learn to summarize literary theory to prepare you to interpret a range of cultural texts.

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 318 if you have taken ENG 308 or ENG 318. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 12653 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00pm-2:20pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Modality: Hybrid (MW: F2F, F: online synchronous)

Global Baroque

Cuban poet and critic Severo Sarduy describes the baroque as “a geologic nodule, mobile and muddy construction, of clay, a syllogistic structure or pear, of this agglutination, this uncontrolled proliferation of signifiers, this dexterous transmutation of thought [that] was needed by the Council of Trent to counteract the arguments of the Reformation” (trans. Christopher Winks).

In this class, we take up the baroque as a lens for exploring 17th-century texts shaped by the rise of absolutist states, the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, European invasions of Africa and the Americas, and scientific innovations. Authors may include Miguel de Cervantes, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Margaret Cavendish, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and others. By the end of the course, you will be able to explain some major characteristics of the baroque style as it moved across the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century, to discuss the concept of the global as it relates to various early modern contexts, to demonstrate an enhanced capacity to closely read and compare complex texts, and to build skills for working and thinking collaboratively.

Students will be responsible for completing 20-50 pages of reading before most class meetings, writing regular reading response posts, participating in two group projects, and submitting their untimed, open-note responses to assessment questions at the middle and final points of the quarter.

CW: This course engages histories of sexual, gendered, religious, and racialized violence. We will prioritize caring for each other and for the language we read and produce together.

ENG 320 Survey: The Long 19th C 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 320 if you have taken ENG 310 or ENG 320. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 12049 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

Victorian Sexualities
Our contemporary culture tends to associate the Victorian era in Britain (1837-1901) with the repression or concealment of desire. This is not completely incorrect: it is true that after the more freewheeling eighteenth century, new codes of public propriety arose in Britain. Victorian sexuality, then, was in some senses "repressed" and heavily regulated. Yet many of those who lived and wrote in nineteenth-century Britain were obsessed with sexuality, and even when sexuality appears to be forbidden or censored, it is often front and center as a topic. You don’t have to look very far beneath the surface, or between the lines, to find evidence of a vast spectrum of sexualities and desires in Victorian art and writing. Topics considered in this course will likely include sex work and the trope of the “fallen woman,” “inversion” or homosexuality, gender fluidity, attitudes towards marriage (including interracial marriage, adultery, divorce, and bigamy), international sex trafficking, and lesbian vampires, among others. We’ll consider these topics as represented in a range of some of the most important fiction, poetry, essays, and art produced in Britain during the nineteenth century.

As a Literature and Culture Requirement survey, then, this course's primary objective is to give you a broader knowledge of the development of British literature over the course of the nineteenth century, situated in relation to important historical and cultural contexts of nineteenth century Britain and the British Empire. By the end of the quarter, you will have a better understanding of specific literary movements and significant innovations that emerged in the period and how they overlap (realism, the dramatic monologue, and sensation fiction, to name a few), as well as a better understanding of nineteenth-century British history and culture: the issues, fears, and desires that emerged in relation to sexuality in said literature.

Course texts will include a selection of shorter pieces that will be available on Canvas. While the list is not yet finalized, longer texts will likely be chosen out of the following: The Woman of Colour, Jane Eyre, Lady Audley’s Secret, Rajmohan’s Wife, Carmilla, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Reuben Sachs, The Romance of a Shop, and/or The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Warning: As its title indicates, this course incorporates mature themes. Please be certain you are willing and able to discuss this kind of material in a mature and respectful way.

ENG 321 Survey: The 20-21st Centuries 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 321 if you have taken ENG 311 or ENG 321. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 13104 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: JR Lara

On Beauty and Transformation

CONTENT: What is beauty? Where do we find beauty (or not find it) in the world, and how might this search transform us? Does beauty have moral purpose–or any purpose? Can encountering beauty make us better people—can beauty, as Elaine Scarry claims, lead us to truth?

This course surveys literature of the 20th and early 21st centuries as it illuminates an era of rapidly changing ideas of what beauty and identity may mean. We will examine the ways in which ideas of beauty weave through literature as a central preoccupation: who has it, who wants it, who denies it, who is redeemed by it, and who is destroyed by it. We will ask: How do characters make–or fail to make–ethical decisions, and how are they transformed?

This is a discussion-based course. During this term we will read three contemporary novels, a philosophy text, and a wide range of current and recent works including poetry, essays, and short stories. We will ground our investigation in a study of aesthetics and the evolution of modernism and postmodernism in literature, art, and culture.

ASSIGNMENTS: Prepare to read! Substantial reading across multiple genres, discussion leadership, regular informal exercises and in-class writing, a group presentation, a critical or creative final project and a final self-evaluation.

EVALUATION: My evaluation is primarily based on your engaged participation in all aspects of the course, including active discussion, faithful attendance, and completion of all coursework including a presentation and final project.

TEXTS:
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (ISBN-10: 0143037749)
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (ISBN-10: 0691089590)
Jennifer Egan, Look at Me (ISBN-10: 0385721358)
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (ISBN-10: 0274885417)

ENG 333 Global Lit

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 12654 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Modality: Hybrid (MW: F2F, F: online synchronous)

Global Baroque

CW: This course engages histories of sexual, gendered, religious, and racialized violence. We will prioritize caring for each other and for the language we read and produce together.

CRN: Reserved for Senegal Program DAY/TIME: M-F 08:00am-12:00pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Scribes & Griots
This course will explore literary and creative expressions of Africa from the time of the Ancient Egyptians to the present. Ancient African as well as more recent Islamic notions of speaking, writing, and other forms of communication will be situated in their proper historical setting and cultural context, including griot and written traditions. We will also explore questions of sorcery, the Abrahamic traditions, especially Islam and West African Sufism, and Ajamization with special reference to the Sahelian setting. To this end, we will focus especially on two prominent Sufi orders in the Sahel: the Umarian Tijaniyya and the Muridiyya. In Senegal, we will meet and speak with prominent members of both orders.

NOTE: The Senegal Program for Winter 2023 is closed. If you would like information about the Senegal Program for Winter 2024, contact Christopher Wise at Christopher.Wise@wwu.edu

More information on the Senegal Program is available here:
https://studyabroad.wwu.edu/program/senegal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvnje7i-57E&t=1s

ENG 334 TextsAcrossNAm&Eur: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent.

CRN: 11163 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Winrock, Cori

Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale

The skeptic might ask: What is the purpose of a fairy tale these days when the wolf has already been cancelled? Why listen to old wives’ tales when global warming is sending Hansel and Gretel’s sugary little woods up in smoke? And yet, in April 2020 as lockdowns swept the nation Sabrina Orah Mark wrote in the Paris Review: “Once upon a time a Virus With A Crown On Its Head swept across the land… ‘Go into your homes,’ said the Virus, ‘or I will eat your lungs for my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.’” At our most vulnerable, it seems, Fairy Tales offer a way to make sense of our lives—opening a window onto sociocultural and community beliefs on topics such as gender, the politics of sex and of mourning, and who gets to tell their stories. In this course, we will investigate the Fairy Tale as a complex narrative form and the ways it has traveled through time—from its transformation into a literary tale by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault in France to the Victorianization of One Thousand and One Nights to the dubious gathering and nationalist tactics of the Grimms to Angela Carter’s second wave revival of the form. We will look at historical trajectories as well as contemporary retellings—examining how Fairy Tales have persisted and been passed down as ways of both calling established social orders into question as well as keeping communities safe. In our explorations, we will engage with a variety of forms from oral stories passed down from teller to listener, to those written down and bound, to adaptations reimagined as comics as well as those for the stage and screen.

ENG 335 Global Texts Outside N.Am &Eur

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent.

CRN: 12225 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony

Global Horror
We will examine the literature of horror and the weird throughout the world.

Texts
• Jenkins and Cagle eds, The Valancourt book of World Horror Stories Vols
1 and 2.
• Vandermeer, Ann and Jeff ed. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and
Dark Stories

CRN: Reserved for Senegal Program DAY/TIME: M-F 08:00am-12:00pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Literary and Creative Expressions Across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Analysis primarily of texts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Repeatable once as an elective with different topics.

This course will examine contemporary West African texts, including novels, films, speeches, as well as political and literary theory. Course concerns will include colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, neo-imperialism, third world literature and post-colonialism, decolonization, racism, négritude, and ethnic conflict, and related topics.

NOTE: The Senegal Program for Winter 2023 is closed. If you would like information about the Senegal Program for Winter 2024, contact Christopher Wise at Christopher.Wise@wwu.edu

More information on the Senegal Program is available here:
https://studyabroad.wwu.edu/program/senegal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvnje7i-57E&t=1s

ENG 338 Women's Lit N Am and Europe

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. BCGM.

CRN: 10271 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Yeasting, Jeanne

CONTENT: This English literature course will focus on a selection of iconic texts by 19th-21st century women authors. We’ll investigate some of the complex issues underlying their writing, such as colonialism, romantic idealization, gender ideals, creolization, and class inequality. We’ll consider some of the ways their texts challenge, resist, talk back to and/or support cultures. And we’ll examine some of the ways women writers are inspired by, revise, and respond to other writers. This is not a lecture-based course: class will be a mixture of discussion of assigned readings and short presentations.

ASSIGNMENTS: Heavy reading! Other requirements include exams/quizzes, collaborative group projects, close reading/literary analysis, literary research, and weekly reading responses.

EVALUATION: Based primarily on active, attentive class participation and fulfillment of assignments, including a Final Project.

TEXTS: Students are expected to buy the specific editions listed below, as they contain background articles/essays, and/or footnotes that will be required reading. Assignments will be based on page numbers in these editions.

1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Broadview Press critical edition with supplementary readings; edited by Richard Nemesvri.
Broadview Press 1st or 2rd critical editions ok.
Don’t order on Amazon (long shipping delays!)
• 1st edition paperback: ISBN 978-1551111803 (pub. 1999) or newer 2nd edition paperback: ISBN 978-1554815241 (pub. 2022)
• e-book available: ISBN 978-551111802
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books annotated edition
• paperback: ISBN 978-0156030410
• e-book available: ISBN 978-0544535169
3. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. Critical edition with supplementary readings; edited by Judith L. Raiskin
W.W. Norton Critical Editions (pub. 1999).
Don’t order on Google – filled with errors!
• paperback: ISBN 978-0393960129
4. Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol. Authorized edition from W.W. Norton.
W. W. Norton (reprint edition 2004)
• paperback: ISBN 978-0393325997
5. Selected texts on Canvas

ENG 339 Mythology and Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. HUM.

CRN: 13830 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Heim, Stefania

ODYSSEYS
The past comes to us in many forms—through myth, narrative, memories, rubble, gaps, instructions, history. And we do many things with those materials: remember, pay homage, contest, inherit, repurpose, reimagine, tell stories, erase, try (and fail) to understand. In this class we will explore these activities through a grounding in Homer’s Odyssey, a story that has been retold countless times; indeed, a story that persists only through and as re-telling. At its root, the Odyssey is a story about a person trying to find his way home. Or, it is a story about a warrior grappling with the end of war. Or, it is a story about women seizing power through available means. Or, it is a story about monsters, witches, and gods. Or, it is a story about hubris. Or, it is a story about telling stories. Navigating these and other topics, this course will foreground questions of translation. The first part of the quarter will be a deep dive into Emily Wilson’s recent (2017) translation of the Odyssey—the first translation into English ever undertaken by a woman. Next, we will trace reverberations of the epic across a range of modern and contemporary works, including Derek Walcott’s resituation of the Odyssey as a play set in the Caribbean; Romare Bearden’s set of collages, A Black Odyssey; Margaret Atwood’s rescuing of the murdered maids’ voices in The Penelopiad; and others. Finally, students will seek out and present their own traces and uses and rebuttals of this myth.

ENG 341 Studies in Children's Lit

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 13817 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Tag, Sylvia G.

In this course we will examine the depth, breadth, and scope of literature written for youth, exploring how literature can be a window, mirror, and sliding glass door. How does children’s literature reflect and refine our understanding of childhood? How is youth represented in folktales, contemporary novels, historical fiction, poetry, and nonfiction literature and who exactly is the audience? Illustration plays a unique role in literature for youth, and we will spend time learning about this important genre. This course is an invitation to recall the power of story in your own youth while delving into social dynamics (historical and contemporary), cultural influences (educational, and publishing), and critical interpretation (scholarly and popular) that come together to create books for young readers. You will demonstrate your learning through a lot of reading, class discussion, weekly literature reviews, and a final project. Students taking this class are required to attend the Annual WWU Children‘s Literature Conference on Saturday, February 25, 2023, when award winning authors and illustrators will present on their creative process.

ENG 343 Critical Childhood Studies

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 13832 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Giffen, Allison

What is childhood and how has it been variously defined and understood? This is one of the central questions of Critical Childhood Studies, a growing field within the humanities. Along with the history and construction of childhood, Critical Childhood Studies also examines textual and visual representations of childhood, exploring, for example, how childhood functions metaphorically in literature and culture. New ideals about childhood emerge in the nineteenth century that are shaped by Romantic notions of childhood innocence. Our work this quarter will focus particularly on the role that race played in these new conceptions of childhood. We will begin with the racialized construction of girlhood in the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Wilson, then explore seduction and consent in the figure of the tragic mulatto, in the work of Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Jacobs. We will conclude by turning to the popular children’s periodical St Nicholas Magazine and investigate the cultural work it performed in its representations of Black and white boyhood.

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10694 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

CONTENT: In this course we’ll read a diverse array of texts written for young adults. These books all address complex notions about identity, power, race, sexuality, gender, class, love, and voice. We’ll explore the texts from a variety of angles, asking questions of the texts themselves and readers’ responses to the texts. In addition to exploring the books, we’ll think about the histories of childhood and adolescence, and how youth culture is represented. We’ll address issues of consumerism, popular culture, and technology, looking at their effects on this genre of literature and its target audience. You should expect much intensive reading and lively discussion.

TEXTS: may include Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter; Emezi, Pet; Higuera, The Last Cuentista; Tamaki, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me; Zoboi and Salaam, Punching the Air

ASSIGNMENTS: Reading responses; discussion questions; mixed-media project, final exam

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10129 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Gulyas, Lee

This course will introduce you to the process of writing—the reading, scribbling, drafting, craft elements, analysis, extensive revision, focus, and discipline that are essential. You will explore, develop, rethink, and revise with the final goal of a portfolio of creative work. This is a skills class, one that will require practice and participation. We will work in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.

Assignments include: exercises, readings, analytical discussions, group discussions on a variety of topics, and extensive revision of your own drafts into your final portfolio.

COURSE GOALS

You will practice reading published work as a writer.
You will work with craft elements and literary techniques in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and read examples from a variety of authors, perspectives, genres, and forms.
You will experiment and take risks to create drafts, then cut, hone, and explore possibilities through revision.
You will actively work to increase your knowledge and skills and aim for professional standards.

CRN: 10383 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Shipley, Ely

Examines the fundamentals of at least two genres, such as fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, or poetry. The course will include both lectures, focused on model texts, and workshop-style discussions, focused on student work.

CRN: 12655 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, José

CRN: 12656 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Gulyas, Lee

Assignments include: exercises, readings, analytical discussions, group discussions on a variety of topics, and extensive revision of your own drafts into your final portfolio.

COURSE GOALS

You will practice reading published work as a writer.
You will work with craft elements and literary techniques in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and read examples from a variety of authors, perspectives, genres, and forms.
You will experiment and take risks to create drafts, then cut, hone, and explore possibilities through revision.
You will actively work to increase your knowledge and skills and aim for professional standards.

CRN: 13111 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Yeasting, Jeanne

CONTENT: This beginning level creative writing course combines a creative component and the study of literature from a writer’s perspective. This course will introduce you to the process of creative writing – the reading, brainstorming, drafting, craft elements, analysis, revising, and discipline that are essential for writers of all genres. You’ll be asked to experiment with various craft elements through writing original poetry and creative nonfiction. To enhance your understanding of craft potentials, we will study writing models from earlier times, as well as contemporary authors. Class will be a mixture of discussion of assigned writing models, writing exercises, and workshops.

ASSIGNMENTS: Assignments include considerable reading of craft essays, writing model poems and creative nonfiction; weekly writing and revising of original poetry and creative nonfiction; giving detailed peer feedback, including written feedback; and completing a Final project. Students may be required to work on a collaborative project.

EVALUATION: Based primarily on active, attentive class participation and fulfillment of assignments, including a Final Project.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

The Poet’s Companion, edited by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. W.W. Norton. paperback: ISBN: 978-0393316544; also available as e-book
In Short, edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones. W.W. Norton. paperback: ISBN: 978-0393314922
Selected texts on Canvas

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Restricted to Creative Writing majors. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10004 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Colen, Elizabeth

In this introductory fiction course, students will analyze all aspects of the short story form, including plot, point of view, characterization, setting, and conflict, as well as the sonic qualities of language; learn how these tools are combined to best effect in the service of storytelling; develop a language for discussing the interplay of a writer’s craft and content; and engage with weekly writing exercises. The final project will be a portfolio that includes 10-15 pages (2500-4000 words) of one fully revised, well-crafted story.

CRN: 10479 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Westhoff, Kami

English 351 is designed to facilitate the continued exploration of the complex world of creating literary fiction. We will read the work of contemporary fiction writers and examine the ways in which they create compelling and innovative fiction through careful and unique attention to such elements as character development, setting, theme, format, and narrative focus. In addition to extensive fiction writing, you will be asked to engage with the literary world on a larger scale, including literary journal research, submitting your work, and presenting a live reading of your own work.

ENG 353 Introduction to Poetry Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Restricted to Creative Writing majors. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10085 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

As a participant in this course, you will be tasked with developing poetic works. We will do an intensive workshopping of the written work by you and your peers. And we will examine fundamental elements of poetry, including dramatic situation, speaker, metaphor, imagery, metrical conventions, sonic conventions, and traditional forms (e.g. villanelle, sonnet). Together, we will learn through reading, writing, discussing and reflecting. We will privilege our writing process, development, and respectful collaboration.

Expect this to be an exciting and challenging course. We will ask big questions and discuss the practical benefits of a creative life. We hope you will develop new ways of thinking, working, writing and communication. We hope you will take risks. For some, this will be their first time writing poetry. You do not have to write “magnificent” poems to do well in this course. You just have to be brave, respectful, and a hard worker.

Required texts include Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire, The Most of It by Mary Ruefle, and No further than the end of the street by Benjamin Niespodziany. I am also asking that you find access to a portable electronic device that will allow you to listen to a podcast and move simultaneously (e.g. walk or dance).

Participation in a 5-credit course is equivalent to 150 hours of work over the quarter. This will include 4 hours of classroom time weekly (lecture, discussions, workshop) and approximately 10 hours of outside preparation (reading, writing, investigating, reflecting, projects). You are also encouraged to visit me in office hours, attend literary events, and (safely) connect with your peers.

ENG 354 Intro to Creative Nonfict Writ 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Restricted to Creative Writing majors. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10366 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Gulyas, Lee

This is a beginning level creative writing class that combines a creative component and the study of literature. We will explore a broad spectrum of content and form, as we work to translate personal experience and research into effective work. Students will submit drafts, provide feedback, and practice discussions in critical exploration of readings. Coursework will include in-class writing exercises, reading responses, writing assignments, and extensive revision. Since this is a five-credit course, the university expects fifteen hours of work per week: five hours in class and ten hours on your own.

Required Texts
Miller & Paola, Tell It Slant, Third Edition (only this edition will work)
all other readings on Canvas, or on the web

CRN: 12295 DAY/TIME: Asynchronous, Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

Students in this section of English 354 will explore a range of forms and themes in the literary genre of creative nonfiction. Through theorizing the ethics of "truth" telling, close reading and analysis of example texts, and immersion in the process of exploratory writing, drafting, revising, and polishing personal essays, participants will come to better understand and express their language, themselves, and their world.

This course is currently planned in remote-learning modality. Assignments and evaluation practices will be posted on Canvas before the quarter begins.

Required Books
· Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (3rd edition, McGraw Hill, 2019)
· The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
· Several personal essays posted on Canvas

Please purchase texts early for less-expensive used editions and consider buying through your local independent seller or campus store.

ENG 364 Introduction to Film Studies

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101.

CRN: 10320 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Youmans, Greg

Film viewing: Monday, 4:00-6:50pm.

The course introduces the foundations of film studies. We will explore core vocabulary, concepts, and skills that help us look and listen more closely to motion pictures. We will also develop practices of critical thinking, argumentation, and analysis through various writing exercises. Our course screenings will present films from around the world and from the historical beginnings of cinema to the present day. In the second half of the term, we will shift focus to a video-production project that will further enrich everyone’s understanding of how movies are put together.

Textbook: David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Jeff Smith. Film Art: An Introduction, 12th edition. New York, NY: McGraw Hill Education, 2019. (You are welcome to use the 10th or 11th edition instead to save money.)

ENG 365 Film Hist: Global Film 1920-1960 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or ENG 202.

CRN: 11393 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

Film viewing: Tuesdays, 4:00-6:50.

This course offers a survey of key films, filmmakers, and cinematic trends that have shaped film history outside North America until 1960. The period between 1920-1960, shaped by two major World Wars, saw the emergence of influential cinematic movements such as German Expressionism, French Poetic Realism, and Italian Neo-Realism. We will unpack the social, historical, and political factors that informed these waves in European filmmaking. Additionally, we will expand the framework beyond Western Europe by studying important directors from Southeast Asia, the Far East, and Latin America, rejecting the Euro-centric approaches that have traditionally dominated the field.

In our analyses of canonical classics from several different regions and time periods, we will discuss many different aspects of film culture ranging from various distribution and exhibition models to the invention of sound and other technological advances, or evolving spectatorship practices. Through a series of (re)discoveries from global film history, we will observe how well-known filmmakers of today are deeply indebted to the pioneers of the past.

Textbook: The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
This is a very large reader covering the entire film history, I highly recommend using the e-book version instead of purchasing an expensive copy. The e-book is available through Western Libraries

ENG 371 Rhetorical Practices 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 and junior status. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4:30pm

CRN: 13132 DAY/TIME: TR 12-1:50pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms” ― Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness

“There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it.

Change the story, change the world” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Our Word is Our Weapon” ― Subcommander Marcos, Zapatista Selected Writings

From its classical origins through today, “rhetoric” continues to be defined mostly in terms of persuasion. Yet, John Baldoni, in the Harvard Business Review, opens his article “Using Stories to Persuade” stating “[i]f you need to make an argument about an issue about which you feel very strongly, don’t use rhetoric. Tell a story instead.” You see, from a popular standpoint, calling something “rhetoric” nowadays is often viewed as an insult.

At the same time, the art and field of rhetoric continues to expand in theory and practice, to include an ethics of engagement with human and beyond human. From this disciplinary standpoint, even stories are articulated to be agential beings. The influence of stories in our worlds is far reaching and with ideological, institutional, and epistemological consequences. In other words, as Plato claims, “those who tell the stories run society.”

Thus, questions remain unsettled: How do stories build arguments? How do stories shape politics, workplaces, communities, homes, worlds? How is storytelling rhetorical?

To explore these questions, this course journeys through rhetorical traditions, theories, and practices, forward and backward in time. In conversation with our evolving understandings of rhetorical theory, projects will entail the rhetorical analysis of stories, responding narratives to stories, as well as our own composition of multi modal stories. The culminating project will be a Zine, either paper or digital.

Approached as a heuristic, rhetoric offers us an evolving ontology for approaching the world, intra acting with it, and becoming through and with it, as a way of navigating diversity and plurality.

400-Level English Courses

ENG 402 Writing & Community Engagement 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 302. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4:30pm.

CRN: 10569 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

In this community-based and field-work course, students gain professional writing experience by working intensively with local groups, companies, governments, and/or nonprofits. Working in writing teams, students' problem-solve to invent, design, build, and implement documentation for their team’s specific community partner. You’ll be building documents that go to work, so a large part of this course will be practicing how to best discern and respond to the needs of specific community partners.

The work we do will help you expand your competency for writing in professional- and community-oriented contexts, including project management, document design, teamwork, research, and using differing digital technologies.

By closely considering the importance of the contexts through which your projects arise, you’ll discover some new things not only about the power and often serious consequences of writing and designing, but also about yourself. I mean, success in college and certainly in the world outside the classroom generally involves more than simply knowing how to read and write. Learning to write and design (or compose) alongside community patterns and within moving and morphing environments will benefit you regardless of the life you’re chasing after. Simply put, good writing, in whatever form it takes, can make lots happen. And that’s what I hope we’re going to do together this Winter quarter—make things happen.

ENG 408 Cultural Studies 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 313 or ENG 314; two courses from: ENG 307-347, ENG 364 or ENG 371. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 12045 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

The Serial Killer in Popular Culture

From ongoing attempts to identify Jack the Ripper, nineteenth-century London’s mysterious murderer, to the devilishly charming depiction of Villanelle in the BBC’s Killing Eve, Anglo-American popular culture is obsessed with depictions of sadistic killers. Whether they’re based on true crime or entirely fictional, these stories frighten and intrigue us, but more importantly, they emphasize the centrality of horrific violence to Anglo-American culture. We seek out ghoulish images of serial killers and participate in the material culture of murderabilia by buying comic books, T-shirts, shower curtains, and even coloring books centered on the figure of the serial killer. Here in the Pacific Northwest, serial killer lore abounds, as in the media attention surrounding Ted Bundy, who grew up in Seattle and still fascinates the popular imagination in Washington and beyond.

In this class, we’ll examine representations of the serial killer in relation to cultural anxieties over public and private spaces, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion, among other things. Some of the questions we will consider include: What is it that makes the figure of the serial killer so compelling? Why, for over 100 years, have authors told serial killer stories, and what might these stories have to communicate about human history? How can we enter existing conversations on this topic in both academia and pop culture? Why do we single out the serial killer from other forms of murder and violence? What are the fears and desires that we embody in the serial killer, and how do representations of the serial killer transform in response to changing cultural demands? Ultimately, what do cultural constructions of the serial killer teach us about ourselves?

Warning: As its title indicates, this course incorporates mature themes. Many of the texts we’ll read or look at include representations of graphic violence and sometimes graphic or violent sexuality. Please be certain you are willing and able to discuss this kind of material in a mature and respectful way.

Course Texts:

You must acquire copies of the following texts. You may use any edition, including digital editions, as long as you can take notes and annotate the text. I have ordered the following hardcopy editions for the Western bookstore, but supply-chain issues have been causing problems, so it might be worth checking out alternative online purchasing sites.

Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer (2019; Anchor Books, ISBN: 9780525564201)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886; Penguin, ISBN: 9780141439730; likely searchable for free in the public domain)
Chelsea Summers, A Certain Hunger (2020; The Unnamed Press, ISBN: 9781951213435)
Additional required short texts will be available on Canvas

In addition to reading the written texts above, you’ll watch/listen to the following:

Atlanta Monster podcast (2018, first 3 episodes)
Berlinger, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile (2019)
Craven, Scream (1996)
Dexter season one (2006)
Hitchcock, Psycho (1960)
Killing Eve season one (2018, selected episodes)

CRN: Reserved for Senegal Program DAY/TIME: M-F 08:00am-12:00pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Scribes & Griots

This course will explore literary and creative expressions of Africa from the time of the Ancient Egyptians to the present. Ancient African as well as more recent Islamic notions of speaking, writing, and other forms of communication will be situated in their proper historical setting and cultural context, including griot and written traditions. We will also explore questions of sorcery, the Abrahamic traditions, especially Islam and West African Sufism, and Ajamization with special reference to the Sahelian setting. To this end, we will focus especially on two prominent Sufi orders in the Sahel: the Umarian Tijaniyya and the Muridiyya. In Senegal, we will meet and speak with prominent members of both orders.

NOTE: The Senegal Program for Winter 2023 is closed. If you would like information about the Senegal Program for Winter 2024, contact Christopher Wise at Christopher.Wise@wwu.edu

More information on the Senegal Program is available here:
https://studyabroad.wwu.edu/program/senegal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvnje7i-57E&t=1s

ENG 410 Lit Hist 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202; plus three from: ENG 307-347, ENG 364, ENG 371. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 11744 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Lee, Jean

Poco Caribbean Lit

Caribbean postcolonial writers often engage in creating national cultures which reject Western definitions of civilization and revive submerged histories of colonialism, slavery, and indenture as sites of resistance. Orality, polyvocality, exilic consciousness, diasporic migrations and returns, folk cultures, and Afro-centric cosmologies are prevalent in Caribbean novels in the 20th-21st centuries. This course will focus on the possibility of Anglophone Caribbean national projects through literature and art by addressing how these themes and literary devices explore the dialectical relationships between
1) neo/imperial legacies and decolonizing culture,
2) national specificity and regionality,
3) citizenship and diaspora, and
4) racial homogeneity and hybridity.
We will be primarily using postcolonial theory and Caribbean feminist and queer theories when analyzing texts by Claude McKay, Earl Lovelace, Paule Marshall, Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, and Alecia McKenzie, etc.

ENG 415 Special Topics in National Lit

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202; plus three from: ENG 307-347, ENG 364, ENG 371. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 13837 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Yu, Ning

Literary Readings of Nature

This course helps students develop a working history of an important literary genre, nature writing, which evolves into what now people call environmental literature. We start with the Chinese poetry in Tang Dynasty (618-907) and trace its influence on three Japanese Hiku masters (Basho, 1644-1694; Busan, 1716-1783; Issa, 1763-1827). Then we travel over oceans to study the way the English gentleman Gilbert White (1720-1793) observes closely the environment of his hometown Selborne. White’s influence can be clearly seen in the works of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who allegedly founded the “Thoreauvian tradition” in environmental literature. In the nineteenth century as well as the twentieth century, women played an important role in environmental studies and made their voices heard clearly. We will read Susan Cooper’s Rural Hours, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony.

ENG 418 Sr Sem: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: Senior status; ENG 313 or ENG 314; and one course from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310 or ENG 311. Opens to Literature Juniors at 4:30pm on November 14. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10417 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Yu, Ning

Seminar on American Environmental Literature

This course surveys a variety of texts about “nature” by American authors and helps students develop a more refined sense of the non-human environment and a better understanding of their own responses to it. The successful student must participate actively in class discussion (15% of total grade), write five five-page essays ( 50%, 10% per essay), write five questions for class discussion (25%, 5% per question and response), and give an oral presentation (10%).

CRN: 10418 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher

Nature’s Time: Pastoral, Plantation, Anthropocene

We sometimes think of nature as timeless: an unchanging background to human activity. But, if we reflect on it, we’re likely to find that time plays an important role in how we define and understand this nebulous thing we call “nature.” Nature is sometimes understood in narrative terms, for instance: something we have lost or something we left behind but could return to. We can fantasize about a nature that once existed and that human activity has destroyed. Or we can see nature as endlessly changing, transformed by its own dynamics or by human activity.

In this course, we will examine literary treatments of nature (or, as we will sometimes call it, “the nonhuman”) that explore the role of time: nature as timeless (as in pastoral poetry), as a resource to be progressively transformed and exploited by human labor (as in writings about plantations of various sorts), or as moving into a dangerous and unstable future (as in novels of environmental apocalypse).

Readings are likely to include a wide range of writers, from Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe to Jesmyn Ward. Course requirements will include regular engagement in the classroom, a variety of short writing and research assignments, and a culminating final essay.

ENG 423 Maj Auth: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 plus three from: ENG 304-347, ENG 364, ENG 370, ENG 371; possible additional prerequisites relevant to topic. WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10321 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

MAJOR AUTHORS: EMIL FERRIS & MARIKO TAMAKI
This course will introduce you to the radical creativity of the indie comix scene with the work of Emil Ferris & Mariko Tamaki. Focusing on the graphic narratives of these queer writers/artists, we will explore the intersectional young adult themes of identity, community, and agency. Through our four texts, we will attempt to articulate and understand the strange, the beautiful, the complex, and the interesting . . . in these graphic novels. The selected texts feature marginalized and under-represented characters and themes, including topics such as love and friendship (relationship building), gender identity, resiliency, depression, and loneliness/isolation. We will celebrate comix as a potentially queer space where openness, fluidity, and non-conformity represent textual strategies as well as characters’ identities. We will also study comix form, technique, and theory; and you will have the opportunity to write about comix as well as create your own comic panels. No artistic experience or illustrating talent is required for this assignment or this class! I also invite you to share your favorite comix or web comix throughout the quarter.

Assignments and Evaluation
You will have the opportunity to write multimodal blogs about Ferris’ and Tamaki’s work. You will also have the chance to engage in comix workshops, where you will create your own panel experiments through drawing or using a comix generator. Students will receive full credit for doing the exercises, which are totally fun! No artistic experience or illustrating talent is required.

Required Texts
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Making Comics, Lynda Barry
My Favorite Thing is Monsters (vol. 1), Emil Ferris

CRN: 10671 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Heim, Stefania

MAJOR AUTHORS: GWENDOLYN BROOKS
“From the first it had been like a
Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.”

Deep study of great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) challenges easy narratives about 20th century American poetry, women’s poetry, Black poetry, and political poetry. Brooks published her first poem when she was 13 years old and went on to become the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. She received great acclaim during her life and almost every major poetry prize. Her widely anthologized “We Real Cool” has inspired an entirely new poetic form. Brooks’s writing is at once formally rigorous and wildly original, both social document and steeped in myth (she re-wrote the Aeneid with a black woman in the hero’s role). In 1967 (when she was 50 years old), she turned away from her mainstream press—and the success and wide readership that came with it—to publish with small Black presses and support the political and artistic energies of younger radical writers. In this course we will attend closely to the historical, social, and political contexts Brooks is in dialogue with, as well as her sonic, rhythmic, and narrative experiments. We will read through almost all of her opus—books of poems including A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, and Riot, and her novel, Maud Martha—as well as responses to her work and recent reckonings with her position in the canon of American literature. This course will provide an opportunity to engage intensively with one of the 20 century’s most important writers as well as to think critically about intersections of race, gender, cultural institutions, poetic forms, and political action in American literary history.

ENG 441 Language and the Sec Classroom 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302 or ENG 371; ENG 347; ENG 350, ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354; two from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320 and ENG 321. Co-requisite: ENG 443. Major restrictions never lift.

CRN: 12663 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30-9:50 am Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven

This course will explore language structure and use in the Secondary Language Arts classroom, including cultural and equity issues, dialect and discourse style bias, ESL learners, and the challenges of standard grammar and conventions. We’ll spend some time addressing linguistic fundamentals as a means of understanding language diversity. This methods course requires the same kind of individual initiative, dedication, and professionalism that you will apply to your future work as a teacher.

ENG 442 Studies in Literacy

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from: ENG 202, ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 371 or instructor permission. Major restrictions never lift.

CRN: 13841 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Qualley, Donna

Almost every social, cultural, educational, or political crises can be connected in some
way to people’s fears about changing literacy practices. In this PWLR course
(Professional writing, literacies, and rhetoric), we’ll examine the historical, social,
cultural, technological, economic, political, and perhaps pedagogical forces that propel
or invite and regulate or restrict different literacy practices. Our goal will be to explode
some common (mis)understandings of what literacy is and what literacy does—for
whom and to whom.

For starters, literacy is not just about someone’s ability to read or write (printed texts).
According to literacy researcher, Deborah Brandt, we might define literacy as the
“capacity to navigate and amalgamate new reading and writing practices [or new ways
of saying and doing], in response to rapid cultural, social, and technological change.”
Given the largeness and complexity of the material and digital worlds in which we
inhabit and interact with today, most people will continue to develop multiple and
diverse literacy practices throughout their lives.

In our short time together, we’ll draw on both theory and story to examine moments of
critical juncture—where and when different literacy tracks intersect, blend, or diverge—
and what that means for you. Throughout the course, you’ll read, write, and design,
working with different print, visual, and digital media. Projects include short
imaginative and critical responses and a culminating project of your design that makes
“short work” of the long story of literacy.

Texts:
• Jason Reynolds: Long Way Down
• All other readings will be available on Canvas

ENG 443 Tch Eng Lang Arts in Sec Sch I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302 or ENG 371; ENG 347; ENG 350; and two courses from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320 and ENG 321.Co-requisite: ENG 441. Major restrictions never lift.

CRN: 10088 DAY/TIME: MWF 10-11:20 am Instructor: Celaya, Anthony

In this course, we will engage with a variety of theory, research, methods, and resources for the teaching of writing within a secondary English language arts context. Together we will write in a variety of genres, including multimodal genres. We will collaborate and work together as we develop a teacher-writer practice to support our development as writers and skills as writing teachers. Additionally, throughout the course we will practice designing, delivering, and revising writing activities and assessments.

ENG 444 Tch Eng Lang Art in Sec Sch II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 443

CRN: 10672 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

CONTENT: This course focuses on the teaching of skills related to reading, interpretation, and critical analysis of literature and other media in secondary school classrooms. The course will also address the specifics of lesson and unit planning.

ASSIGNMENTS: Assigned reading; lesson plans; discussion plan and performance; reading module

TEXTS: may include: Gallagher, Deeper Reading; Higuera, The Last Cuentista

ENG 451 Creative Wrtng Seminar:Fiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10130 Day/Time: MWF 11:30-12:50pm Instructor: Trueblood, Kate

“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. The first draft is the most uncertain—where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.”
—Bernard Malamud

Welcome. This workshop will be devoted to writing scenes, those units of dramatic action in which characters speak and act, as opposed to summaries or exposition about what the characters are doing. Scenes are the lifeblood of fiction. They make it an experience for the reader. They are the building blocks of the short story and the novel. We shall undertake subjects specific to your generation because writers need to be strongly grounded in the questions of their own era. We also have the chance to read a range of published short stories and discuss them in the spirit of shared inquiry. Close observation of published work is how writers learn to write. Later we will devote ourselves to each other’s written work in small focus groups and as one large workshop.

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, ed., Williford & Martone
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Dave King & Renni Brown

CRN: 10570 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

In this advanced course on the writing of fiction, you will be tasked with developing fictional worlds, characters and predicaments. We will do an intensive workshopping of the written work by you and your peers. A significant emphasis will be placed on the writing of dialogue.

Expect this to be an exciting and challenging course. We hope you will develop new ways of thinking, working, writing and communicating. We hope you will take risks. You do not have to write a magnificent polished piece to do well in this course. You will have to be brave, respectful and a hard worker.

We will examine a diverse body of published work; required readings will be available on CANVAS. I would like to ask that you find access to a portable electronic device that will allow you to listen to a podcast and move simultaneously (e.g. walk or dance).

ENG 453 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Poetry 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10360 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Beasley, Bruce

This course will be an intensive seminar in poetry writing. Students will write and extensively revise at least five poems. We’ll write in reaction to the poetics of a wide variety of poets, both traditional and radically experimental. The course will focus on physicality of image and precision of diction, musicality and rhythm, innovative approaches to poetic form, intellection and meditation, and modulation of intense emotion. We’ll examine student poems in full class discussions, small group workshops, written meditations and critiques, and in conference discussions of multiple revisions. Requirements include five drafts, multiple and extensive revisions (we’ll especially focus on strategies for revision and particular ways of incorporating the feedback you receive in workshops and written comments and conferences), meditations on poetics, and a final essay.

ENG 454 Creative Wrtg Sem: Nonfiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10342 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, José

An advanced workshop course in the writing of nonfiction, building on skills learned in prior courses. Repeatable with different instructors to a maximum of 10 cr.

ENG 455 Living Writers 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One from ENG 351, ENG 353, ENG 354

CRN: 13842 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

This course is for poets who want to explore the relationship between writing and publishing. We will have several poets who are also poetry publishers join our class virtually to discuss their work and share ideas about how to participate in publishing. We will examine publication in literary journals and anthologies, chapbooks, conventional and letterpress publishing, and ebooks, and will consider how to promote published poetry. Students will read a poetry collection by each visiting poet, engage in a discussion/presentation about each poet’s craft as a writer and work as a publisher, will produce new poetry in response to readings and prompts, will submit poetry for publication, and will collaborate as an editor for a self-produced poetry anthology.

Textbooks: Required textbooks by visiting poets will be announced two weeks before class on Canvas (please look ahead). PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing by Jeannine Hall Gailey is recommended.

ENG 457 Special Topics Poetry Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 13843 DAY/TIME: MW 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Shipley, Ely

Divinatory Poetics
Kathryn Nuernberger notes, “Poetry and mysticism have long shared stylistic and theoretical kinship—there is between them a shared trust in associative logic, appreciation for visions derived from dream states, and deep attention to and analysis of iconic imagery… [a] complicated ambivalence towards power, which they describe, praise, invoke, and challenge.” Alexis De Veaux discusses her writing practice in terms of approaching “Black shamanic texts,” stating that her “work is grounded in… something sacred…trying to speak with Spirit. Spirit comes, tells me their name, what their thing is… and how to move from there.” Jack Spicer discussed the role of the poet as taking dictation from “Martians” and “spooks” over radio waves. James Merrill turned Ouija transcripts into poems. Poet CA Conrad engages in what they call “(soma)tic rituals” to access an “extreme present.” Ariana Reines reads astrology. Hoa Nguyen, Timothy Liu, and Selah Saterstrom all divine tarot. This course will survey various poets and generative writing techniques informed by occult practices such as bibliomancy, dream work, automatic writing, and so on. Tarot will focus the course and be our main tool for accessing intuition and further developing the art of reading and writing.

ENG 459 Editing and Publishing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10695 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Westhoff, Kami

English 459 will ask you to engage in various exercises, activities, research, and projects related to the world of the writing, editing, and publishing of literary work. By the end of this course, you will have gained a more complex understanding of some of the nuances, complications, opportunities, and rewards of being a part of the publishing world. Though we will cover an array of publishing elements, this course is tailored toward publishing in literary journals, which is often a writer’s first interaction with the publishing world.

ENG 460 MultiGenreWrit: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 11584 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Beasley, Bruce

In this seminar we will explore our own dreams, neurophysiology of dreaming, psychological theories of the dream, and poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that work in ways parallel to the work of the dream through radical juxtaposition, fragmentation, repetition, hyperassociation, intense and elusive imagery. Among writers we may read are Borges, Calvino, Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, Link, Kafka, Beckett, Murakami, Danez Smith, and various contemporary and experimental writers in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry working in the vein of the marvelous, slipstream, magical realist, and other nonlinear forms. The class will write poetry, fiction, and nonfiction drawing from one another's dream images, narratives, and dialogues and our discussions of dream structure. The course is designed to experiment with writing in dream-like forms in various genres.

CRN: 10396 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Winrock, Cori

Beautiful Mutants | Hybrid Forms
Not all writers’ work can be described by a single category. Is this a comic or a poem? Is this computer code or a quilted essay? Is this karaoke or a slide show? In this course we’ll explore work that mashes up multiple writing genres and crosses boundaries with subversive fervor. Through beautiful mutants such as poetry comics, lyric animation and queer art video games, interactive and object-based essays, Victorian valentines, motion poems, and image/text books we’ll explore ways that hybrid forms are used to communicate complex ideas that a single genre can’t always capture. Alongside researching, writing, and designing your own mutations, this course will be a deep dive into the history of hybridity and the sociocultural climate where these forms are born—often out of necessity and lack of admission to a particular canon.

ENG 466 Screenwriting: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or one from: ENG 350, ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 13181 MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Youmans, Greg

Film viewing: Wednesdays, 5:00-7:50 pm.

The course introduces screenwriting with an emphasis on the art of storytelling. We will focus on the writing of narrative screenplays, both short and feature-length. To guide our efforts, we’ll explore and analyze a range of examples, both as screenplays and final films, ranging from art cinema to indie films to mainstream Hollywood movies. Although our focus will be on linear narrative storytelling, we may also look at examples of screenwriting for other genres and formats, such as television, online video, and interactive storytelling.

You will often work collaboratively in class on exercises geared toward developing stories, characters, dialogue, and screenplays. Although some time will be set aside for in-class writing, most of our time together will be devoted to inspiring and guiding the projects you’ll be working on outside of class. The term will culminate in substantial work toward a full treatment and at least ten pages of a feature-length screenplay.

Graduate Courses: 500-Level English Courses

ENG 504 Seminar in Writing of Poetry

Opens to MAs after 10:30 on Tuesday, Nov. 15.

CRN: 13182 DAY/TIME: TR 4:00-5:50 pm Instructor: Wong, Jane

Writing Poetry: The Poetics of Engagement and Dissent
Audre Lorde writes: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” This graduate-level seminar will explore the role of poetry as deeply engaging, resisting, and changing our current society. Who are we as poets in today’s world? How can we wrestle with the complexities and intersections of our personal and collective lives through language? With rigorous attention to the relationship between form and content, we will write poems in dialogue with prominent contemporary poets. As an active poetry community, we will revisit the stakes of poetry via seminar discussions, constructive feedback, and radical revision strategies. Some poets we will engage with include: Gwendolyn Brooks, Danez Smith, Ross Gay, Layli Long Soldier, Don Mee Choi, Solmaz Sharif, Chen Chen, and more. We will also welcome guest poets in our class, including Paul Hlava Ceballos.

ENG 505 Seminar in Writing Nonfiction: 5cr

Opens to MAs after 10:30 on Tuesday, Nov. 15.

CRN: 13183 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Miller, Brenda

Wonders and Delights: Using Micro-Observations in Your Writing
In this class, we will study several models that show us how to cultivate and sharpen our observational skills to broaden the range of our writing. In looking closely at the small details of the world, we can often segue into larger themes and insights, perhaps even finding some joy and wonder along the way. We will do lots of generative writing exercises, including daily/weekly writing assignments, with a goal toward a finished project to share with the class and wider audience. The work you generate in this class could form the basis of your MFA thesis or add to a nonfiction/hybrid project you already have in progress.

Texts:

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Additional readings on Canvas and online

ENG 510 Rhetoric: 5cr

CRN: 10290 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00-09:50 am Instructor: Cushman, Jeremy

New and Material Publics

First things first:
1. I expect (and in some ways, I hope) that most of you will be coming into this class with basically no experience with rhetorical theory or practice. I'm expecting you've not thought much about the word rhetoric and, frankly, that you're a little surprised to find yourself considering this class.

What that means is that we'll spend the first two and half weeks together discussing and working through what we could call the "basics." We're going to start at the very start: E.g. 'What is this word rhetoric trying to name?' 'Why do we have to have this word at all?' 'What value might it still have for us (if any)?'

2. This is not a class about teaching composition/writing. Of course, your own ENG 101 classes will come up in conversation because that work often serves as a lovely example for what we're dealing with together. But please know that rather than the teaching of composition, this class is grounded in rhetorical theory and practice in terms of how, in the 21st century, different publics form and dissolve. And, it's about your participation in those publics.

So then, what's this class about:
In a tiny nutshell, this class is generally about the fact that persuasion is baked into our living in a world with others; it's baked into anything we can name as a public. There need not exist a persuader for persuasion to happen. So my general question for the class is how and when does persuasion happen in certain kinds of publics, and what possible responses are available for us in those publics? In other words, this class generally concerns what's important about the fact that there exists no such thing as "not being persuaded." If you think of yourself, your writing, your responsibilities, your [fill in the blank] one way rather than another way, then you're persuaded. So why and how does that matter? For you, and for the publics in which you want to act?

How does the class work?:
FIRST 2.5 WEEKS
I'll write and then record short "podcast-y" style lectures so you can read and/or listen to some of the ways rhetoric, as a concept, has been approached differently within the (western) tradition, which will also include the ways folx have worked brilliantly to resist locating rhetoric only in the Greek classical tradition (again, the western tradition). That is, we'll start by laying out some basic premises from which to work together.

NEXT THREE WEEKS
Once we all feel some stability with rhetoric and, relatedly, with what "counts" as a public, we'll slow way (way!) down and watch, listen to, and read rhetoric scholars who complicate, challenge, and work to better articulate the value of rhetoric and publics. In particular, we'll respond to people working from Indigenous Knowledge practices to reframe rhetoric in terms of concepts like 'haunting' and "all our relations." We'll respond to Black scholars working in rhet/comp who make a compelling case that rhetoric, if it's going to be valuable at all for differing publics, necessarily has to be approached from a position other than white, male, self-sufficient masculinity. And we'll read about examples from people who have tried to build classes, public art projects, and scholarship that blur, if not ignore, the boundaries between the university (where rhetoric is studied) and the public(s) in which it emerges.

THE THREE WEEKS AFTER THAT
We'll slowly read through D. Diane Davis's book, Inessential Solidarity. In her book, Davis makes a compelling case that what we all share (within any public) is an ethical, always prior obligation to respond to each and every other all the time. She says this obligation to respond is pre-originary, and such a pre-originary response is not a choice but rather is as undeniable as is the obligation to age. Such an ethical obligation generates new possibilities for publics and for public rhetoric because it pushes beyond symbolic/language theories of persuasion toward more fundamental (and undeniable!) notions of our necessary openness—our constant affectability and responsivity.

Your Project (we'll spend the last two weeks working on these together):
While we are exploring this relationship between rhetoric and publics, you'll be completing your own public engagement project. I'll assign this about halfway through the quarter. The project is pretty open; it might consist of, say, a designed social media campaign, a guerrilla poetry project, a proposal to change a public system or policy, a set of small essays for an online platform, a podcast project, a longer research essay for an academic public, a collection of flash fiction designed to engage or invent a specific public, and so on. What you decide to make will depend on what theories and practices get a hold of you as you think through the publics in which in you act.

Required text:
Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations

ENG 540 Globl Lits: 5cr

CRN: 12666 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-1:50pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

Individual and Collective in the Utopian/Dystopian Imagination

What room is there for the individual in a perfect society? What about a collapsed humanity? Does the singular voice matter in the collective? In this class we will examine the tension between the individual and the collective in utopian and dystopian works of literature. We will trace how authors construct the relationships between characters and the societies they inhabit in both the best and worst of possible worlds. In the process we will learn what the dynamic between self and collective says about the human imagination and its ability to navigate the dream of alternative possible societies. We will investigate whether there is a fundamental difference between utopias and dystopias and how the world itself shapes how the story is told. We will look at creative works by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Yoko Ogawa, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, as well as critical work by Donna Haraway, Frederic Jameson, David Graeber, Ernst Bloch, and Lyman Sargent.

ENG 560 Studies in British Literature: 5cr

CRN: 13844 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-1:50pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher

Africa and Africans in the Atlantic World, 1660-1807
This course examines Africa and Africans as they appear in print, performance, and visual culture in the Anglophone world roughly from the chartering of the Royal African Company in 1663 to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. The seminar will discuss varying representations of slavery, of Africans, and of Africa, investigating texts produced in the British Isles, the Caribbean, and North America. While the course will attend to portrayals of slavery and the slave trade generated by Africans, Britons, and Americans, it will also examine the way Africans (both in Africa and in diaspora, and both as writing subjects and rhetorical objects) shape emerging conceptions of race and of the human and the animal; critiques of slavery from Christian and neoclassical perspectives; new thinking about human rights and liberty; cultures of affect and sentiment in Britain, British America, and the early United States; and the uses of Sub-Saharan Africa for various tendencies in political theory.

Authors examined will likely include Aphra Behn; Daniel Defoe; Olaudah Equiano; Ignatius Sancho; Phillis Wheatley; Ottobah Cugoano;

Course requirements will include engaged participation in the classroom, a variety of short writing assignments, and a final seminar paper.

ENG 580 Studies in Film: 5cr

CRN: 13845 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00–11:50am Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

Film Viewing: W 5:00–7:50 pm

This seminar explores various ways through which the production, circulation, and consumption of cinematic texts intersect with the notions of immigration, diaspora, and exile. We will focus on several historical, social, and economic contexts including:

- The wave of German-speaking filmmakers who worked in the United States during and after the Nazi regime,
- The cinematic representations of the Jewish experience in Latin America,
- The role popular Hindi-language films play in shaping the Indian diaspora and the relationship diaspora audiences maintain with their homelands,
- The legacy of colonialism on both contemporary European films and the cinematic output of African countries formerly colonized by European nations,
- The recent roster of films depicting the ongoing European refugee crisis as it continues to unfold.

What are the common thematic and stylistic elements that characterize cinematic portrayals of immigration across such a wide range of contexts? What are the key concepts, debates, and points of contention in the theorization of cinema’s relationship with the immigrant experience as formulated by prominent film scholars? In seeking answers to these questions (and other similar ones), we will see many significant films, read canonical texts, and work towards a mid-length research article throughout the quarter.

Readings:
Most of the readings will be available on Canvas. The required books are:
An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking by Hamid Naficy, Princeton University Press, 2001.
The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema by Temenuga Trifonova, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Selected Films (Tentative):
The Time That Remains, dir. Elia Suleiman, 2009
Le Havre, dir. Aki Kaurismaki, 2011
Joy, dir. Sudabeh Mortezai, 2018
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973
News from Home, dir. Chantal Akerman, 1976
The Other Side of Heaven, dir. Fatih Akin, 2007
Black Girl, dir. Ousmane Sembene, 1966
No Fear No Die, dir. Claire Denis, 1990

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, dir. Aditya Chopa, 1995
Bhaji on the Beach, dir. Gurinder Chadha, 1993
Alambrista, dir. Robert M. Young, 1977
El Norte, dir. Gregory Nava, 1983
Colossal Youth, dir. Pedro Costa, 2006
The Lost Embrace, dir. Daniel Burman, 2004

Winter 2023 Course Descriptions

Table of Contents

100-Level English Courses

200-Level English Courses

300-Level English Courses

400-Level English Courses

Graduate English Courses

100-Level English Courses

ENG 100 Intro to College Writing 5cr

CRN: 13081 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-1:00 pm Instructor: Lucchesi, Andrew

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 WritinHumanit: 5cr

CRN: 14060 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Hannah Carlson

CRN: 10690 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Sophia Brauner

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

CRN: 10061 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony

CRN: 10186 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Patterson, Dayna

CRN: 10510 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy

CRN: 10691 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon

CRN: 10692 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Teer, Kaitlyn

CRN: 10693 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

CRN: 14161 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

ENG 203 Wrtg for Public&Prof Audiences 5cr

CRN: 13095 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael

ENG 216 American Literature 5cr

CRN: 13825 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

ENG 227 Queer Literature

CRN: 12528 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Guess, Carol

ENG 238 Society through its Literature

CRN: 12650 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

ENG 239 Latina/o Literatures 5cr

CRN: 13826 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg Stds: 5cr

CRN: 10335 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Celaya, Anthony

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

CRN: 10319 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael

CRN: 10369 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel

CRN: 10415 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 10465 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael

CRN: 10521 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon

11155 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

CRN: 12294 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5cr

CRN: 11388 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Modality: Hybrid (MW: F2F, F: online synchronous)

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

CRN: 11389 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5cr

CRN: 11390 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

ENG 311 Seminar: The 20-21st Century 5cr

CRN: 11391 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 10:00am.

CRN: 10084 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

CRN: 12651 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

CRN: 12652 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lee, Jean

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5cr

CRN: 12653 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00pm-2:20pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Modality: Hybrid (MW: F2F, F: online synchronous)

ENG 320 Survey: The Long 19th C 5cr

CRN: 12049 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

ENG 321 Survey: The 20-21st Centuries 5 cr

CRN: 13104 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: JR Lara

ENG 333 Global Lit

CRN: 12654 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Modality: Hybrid (MW: F2F, F: online synchronous)

CRN: Reserved for Senegal Program DAY/TIME: M-F 08:00am-12:00pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

ENG 334 TextsAcrossNAm&Eur: 5cr

CRN: 11163 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Winrock, Cori

ENG 335 Global Texts Outside N.Am &Eur

CRN: 12225 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony

CRN: Reserved for Senegal Program DAY/TIME: M-F 08:00am-12:00pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

ENG 338 Women's Lit N Am and Europe

CRN: 10271 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Yeasting, Jeanne

ENG 339 Mythology and Literature 5cr

CRN: 13830 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Heim, Stefania