Fall 2023 Course Descriptions

Major Restrictions have been lifted from all Fall 2023 English Courses!

Prerequisites and class restrictions remain enforced. Restrictions never lift from ENG 441, 443, 444 or from 500-level graduate courses

100-Level English Courses

ENG 100 Intro to College Writing 5cr

CRN: 40039 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 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.

CRN: 40286 DAY/TIME: MTWRF 09:00-09:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael

English 100 is an introduction to college-level written communication, which involves skills in reading, critical thinking, research, writing, and study itself. This course is an opportunity for you to further develop your ability to read for understanding, generate ideas in response to your reading, and communicate those ideas clearly, fairly, and accurately.

To be successful in any field of study, be it biology, business, or art, you will need to communicate your unique perspectives, so my goal is to help you become a more creative, curious, and engaged thinker and writer, with more confidence in your power to generate and fulfill ideas. You will be exploring a variety of texts, questioning these texts and our own responses to them through discussions and activities, and writing with fluency and control using the conventions of standard written English.

You will be writing in several contexts, but the emphasis will be on work that develops ideas through analysis of your reading. You will emerge from this course a stronger writer and reader with enhanced perspectives on a variety of issues both personal and public, and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading and writing more than ever, with a renewed curiosity about the world and how you can write about it.

ASSIGNMENTS: We will read intensively rather than extensively, with less than 50 pages total of reading for the course. Readings will be drawn from contemporary topics. You will write up to 7 short informal papers of about 3 pages, and one longer essay of about 7 pages.

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: 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; GUR: CCOM

CRN: 40724 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael

This Comm C GUR course offers you the opportunity to practice the kinds of inquiry and writing we do in the Humanities within a specific context. Our context for this class will be (for current lack of a better term) “pop music,” which for our purposes will mean any music that depended on mass production for its power: from Billie Holliday to FKA twigs, from The Carter Family to Mudhoney.

Although we will be listening to lots of music together, the subject of our study will specifically be the mass-produced writing that has accompanied this mass-produced music, particularly contemporary pop (from the mid-20th century to the present). This will include such things as music reviews, lyrics, and liner notes of course, but also extend into weighty tomes of cultural criticism, music journalism, music documentaries, and fiction made in response to music. My hope is that you will leave the class not only far more aware of the reach of writing in the humanities, but far more knowledgeable about the place of pop music in our culture and history (and perhaps having had your horizons stretched out a bit).
ASSIGNMENTS: Students will write about 20 pages of analytic writing total across three writing projects. Students will also be required to read and write in response to the reading of one full-length book of music criticism or history.

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; GUR: BCOM

CRN: 40162 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, 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: 40288 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Lester, Mark

Narrative Consciousness
This class focuses on writing as a means of critically engaging works of literature. Assignments will be centered on stories and novels by three modern authors (Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Bioy Casares) that examine the nature of conscious or phenomenal experience, the use of language to give expression to this experience, and (by extension) the very notion of the self. In addition to the primary literary texts, we will read a variety of shorter theoretical works pertinent to the theme and explore ways of employing this material in the development of an original essay. Topics include: developing a strong thesis, organizing the essay, writing with concision, and writing with precision.
Evaluation: Short writing exercises and response papers; more fully developed “working papers”; three short
essays.
Texts: Samuel Beckett, Nohow On; Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of
More

CRN: 40413 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Weed, Katie

Satire & Social Change: Satire can make us laugh, wince, and question what we accept. In this section of 202, we will examine satirical literature dealing in particular with themes of limits and boundaries. We’ll explore satire in multiple genres and forms--sampling works from a broad range of time periods and cultures--and probe ways satire can complicate our views, sometimes effecting change and others impeding it.

Studying novels, short stories, poetry, and film, we will hone skills in close reading and critical analysis of literary texts via various theoretical lenses, paying special attention to how language, style, and form contribute to social and/or political claims. Coursework will include extensive informal writing, group work, some creative writing, and multi-draft critical essays with a focused, arguable thesis supported by thoughtful sequences of claims and carefully selected textual evidence.

CRN: 40723 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark

Two Minor Authors: Franz Kafka & Clarice Lispector
This class focuses on writing as a means of critically engaging works of literature. Attention will be given to formal or structural dimensions of the literary work as well as to subject matter. We will also explore the way in which cross disciplinary critical analysis can illuminate the significance or meaning of a literary work and at the same time open up interesting and important non-literary modes of research. Writing-related topics include: developing a strong thesis, organizing the essay, writing with concision, and writing with precision.
Assignments will be centered on stories by Franz Kafka and Clarice Lispector. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “minor literature,” we will explore how these two writers can be said to remain, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, strangers within their own languages, writers who experience the languages in which they are writing as a kind of foreign language. This unique perspective allows an opening up of “creative lines of escape,” an unsettling of the dominant language and order, an overturning of the usual or habitual ways in which one makes sense of the world.
Evaluation: Short writing exercises and response papers; more fully developed “working papers”; three
short essays.
Texts: Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories and The Passion
According to G.H

CRN: 41384 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm 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: 41677 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: TBD

CRN: 41997 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Weed, Katie

ENG 203 Writing for Public and Professional Audiences 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101, GUR: CCOM

CRN: 42725 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Brown, Nicole

English 203 is designed to provide you with instruction and practice in the creation of highly effective documents custom-tailored to specific public and professional audiences and their functional contexts. Writing in this course is focused on how readers and writers use public and professional texts — readers and writers who are making decisions, choosing actions, or accomplishing tasks.

Through this course, you will learn and practice the skills of public and professional writing. Such writers present complex information with impeccable organization and clarity across many different kinds of documents: letters, reviews, reports, blog posts, proposals, and presentations. Projects will engage the process of determining the specific requirements of a particular audience and purpose and making careful selection and presentation of information for specific effect.

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

ENG 227 Queer Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: BCGM

CRN: 41138 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm 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 writing through the lens of shifting paradigms of sexuality and gender. Requirements include five short essays and one group presentation.

ENG 234 African-American Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: BCGM

CRN: 44062 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: TBD

Analysis, interpretation and discussion of written, spoken and visual texts by African-American men and women from the 18th century to the present.

ENG 235 Native/Indigenous Literatures 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: BCGM

CRN: 41678 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Warburton, Theresa

Analysis, interpretation and discussion of written, spoken and visual texts in English and translation by native and indigenous writers and storytellers of North America.

ENG 236 Asian American Literatures 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: BCGM

CRN: 44063 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

Analysis, interpretation and discussion of written and visual texts in English and translation by and about Asian Americans.

ENG 282 Global Lits: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: HUM

CRN: 42180 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Course Description: An introduction to world literature with special emphasis on Northwest Africa and the Middle East. We will read poetry, short stories, memoirs, novels, films. Regular attendance and in-class writing are required. Class writing will be done long hand for all students (except for those with formal accommodations). Cellphone usage is not permitted in the classroom. Students will do group work and write an in-class, midterm exam and an in-class final. They will also write one formal paper of 4-5 pages. The class format is lecture with discussion. Students will gain a foundation for further global literary study.

Course Texts:

Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
Mahmud Darwish, Unfortunately It Was Paradise
Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poems
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Mariama Ba, So Long A Letter
Al Hajj Sekou Tall, The Writings of Al Hajj Sekou Tall
Norbert Zongo, The Parachute Drop
Mohammed Choukri, For Bread Alone

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg&Public: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior status; or instructor permission; WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, May 11th at 4:30pm.

CRN: 40098 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 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 standing; WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, May 11th at 4:30pm.

CRN: 40099 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am 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: 40330 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 40390 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 40402 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.

CRN: 40481 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 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: 40528 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel

CRN: 44201 Staff Poulsbo Campus - State Supported

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, May 11th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, 15th, at 10:00am.

CRN: 41341 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Vulic, Kathryn

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 307 if you have taken ENG 307 or ENG 317.

Literature and Culture I: Pre-16th Century

Course Description and Objectives: Get ready for a wild ride – medieval literature is not what you think it might be, given the ways that medieval texts and history are represented in popular culture! There’s a lot more subtlety, sophistication, humor, and literary variety than the Middle Ages get credit for. This course covers the first era in the Literature and Culture sequence, from the earliest surviving writings in English to the advent of the printing press in England. We will sample a broad array of genres, techniques, forms, and themes of the literature of medieval England, many of which establish models and expectations for the writings of later eras. We will also trace the effects of an increasingly literate population and increasingly sophisticated writing technology (like the introduction of paper and the printing press to England) on literary culture.

This class aims at breadth of coverage (with course readings consisting of excerpts as well as whole texts), rather than depth, though this course could be designed productively either way. This class focuses on what it meant to read and write in Middle English, and therefore strives not only for a general understanding of the politics and other social factors that influence writing in English, but also examines the range of writing interests expressed by those who chose to compose in English.

Textbook: Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 1: The Medieval Period (3rd ed., 2014) and supplements posted to Canvas that you will need to print and bring to class.

Tentative assignments: I assign a variety of assignments that encourage both formal and informal writing, as well as both deep, analytical investigation (which manifests in essays) and broad, synthetic thinking (which manifests in exams).

Weekly Canvas postings, to ground daily discussion in your questions and interests (10%)
Research project, offering multiple approaches so you can pick a topic that interests you (20%)
Analytical essay, giving you the opportunity to dig deeper into a text you enjoy (20%)

Midterm and final, giving you a chance to review/synthesize what you learn in class (20% each)
Participation, encouraging you to get the most out of our class time (10%)

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, May 11th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, 15th, at 10:00am.

CRN: 41342 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

Translating Americas/Americas Translated

Although their work is often rendered invisible, translators and interpreters play a vital role in shaping the histories and literatures of the American hemisphere from the sixteenth century to the present. This class considers translation and interpretation as written, spoken, and embodied practices that enable survival, unsettlement, diplomatic relationships, revolt, rebellion, textual transfer, narrative control, and collaborative meaning-making.

This in-person class is designed as a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). For the first five weeks of class, we will closely read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that feature translators and interpreters, and we will build a working understanding of key concepts in translation studies and early American studies. During the second half of class, students will gain experience producing original research in the fields of translation studies and book history by working together to create a digital database of paratexts and prefaces from English-language translations of a Spanish colonial text. I expect and require all students to be accountable to our learning community by showing up and actively participating in all in-person class meetings and by respecting all due dates for all assignments.

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, May 11th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, 15th, at 10:00am.

CRN: 41343 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 309 if you have already taken ENG 319 or 309.

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: Broadview Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A, Beginnings to 1820

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, May 11th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, 15th, at 10:00am.

CRN: 41344 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 310 if you have already taken ENG 320 or 310.

The "Other" Victorians

Contemporary American culture tends to assume the Victorian era in Britain (1837-1901) was stuffy, conservative, and obsessed with propriety – a dark time of oppression and repression very far from our own enlightened, progressive, and modern twenty-first century. This is a vast and reductive oversimplification. While it’s true that after the more freewheeling eighteenth century, new codes of public propriety arose in Britain, that’s only one small part of a much more complex cultural story.

The nineteenth century was an age of change and challenges to established cultural norms in Britain and beyond: the Industrial and Darwinian Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, anticolonial rebellion, and the emergence of women’s rights, among others. In 1964, scholar Stephen Marcus published The Other Victorians, a groundbreaking examination of Victorian sexuality, pornography, and flagellation that insisted upon acknowledging the revolutionary underside of Victorian culture. As Marcus’s work made clear, humans have always existed with a spectrum of desires and viewpoints, and many of those who lived and wrote in the nineteenth century did so while breaking the hegemonic cultural rules. Their literature, like their lives, was subversive, sometimes kinky, and frequently just plain weird. They, too, were Victorians.

In this class, we’ll investigate a fuller historical and human dimension of nineteenth-century Britain and the British Empire via some of the fiction, poetry, essays, and art produced by these “other” Victorians: people who pushed boundaries, rebelled against societal norms, and critiqued the dominant culture. In doing so, we’ll analyze evolving conceptions of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, disability, and other forms of personal identity in a time of cultural change, as well as evolving forms of literature, including the Gothic, realism, detective fiction, science fiction, the dramatic monologue, and maybe even a little pornography.

Content Warning: This course incorporates mature themes. Some of the texts we’ll read include representations of violence and/or sexuality. I did not assign these texts lightly. Rather, it is my goal for us to confront those elements sensitively, thoughtfully, and deeply, as I hope we do when we encounter them in the real world. Literature (in all its modalities) exists in part to help us process and cope with the realities of human crises and trauma, and in asking us to confront these things, it also actively encourages our empathy with and for others. To be a student in this class, you will need to commit to reading and discussing this material and doing so in a mature, respectful way.

Course Objectives: As a Literature and Culture Requirement seminar, this course provides deep analysis of the literature, history, and cultural context of nineteenth-century Britain and the British Empire and is intended to help you prepare for academic writing in 400-level seminar courses in English. Reading assignments go beyond traditional “canonical” texts. Because literature is not written in a vacuum, the reading assignments in this course also go beyond the literature itself, including the scholarship you need to practice responsible analysis of historical texts. Writing assignments are designed to help you hone your analytical abilities, scholarly voice, and research skills. We’ll also allocate class time to learning and practicing those skills.

Student Learning Outcomes (what you’ll get from your work in this class):

Increased understanding of nineteenth-century British literature, history, and culture.
Increased ability to analyze nineteenth-century literature and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context as well as our present moment. 
Increased capacity to compare and contrast texts of different forms or genres, making connections between different texts and/or critical theories.
Increased ability to perform and then apply proactive research.
Increased autonomy in assessing literary texts and critical theories.
Increased ability to write cogent literary criticism.
Increased ability to participate in an ongoing academic conversation.
Increased self-awareness of personal reading, writing, and methodological practices.

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, May 11th at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, 15th, at 10:00am.

CRN: 41345 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 311 if you have already taken ENG 321 or 311.

Cybernetic Fiction: Narrative in the New Media Ecology

Course Description

This seminar will explore one of the most important developments in contemporary literary study: the convergence of 20th-21st century narrative and digital technology. Basically, we’ll be looking at the ways in which literary artifacts have enlarged and redefined their territory of representation and range of technique and play, while maintaining their viability in a new media ecology. Specifically, we’ll be analyzing the relationship between experimental print texts and digital media, including canonical novels of high modernism and postmodernism, artists’ books, electronic literature, word-image texts, and interactive games. We’ll also be engaging in a new form of literary discourse--media-specific analysis--which attends to the specificity of form as well as to citations and imitations of one medium in another. As defined by N. Katherine Hayles, “media-specific analysis moves from the language of text to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink, mutable image and durable mark, computer and book. Media-specific analysis insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effects we call literature.”

Assignments

This seminar is focused on close reading and critical analysis of both print and digital texts. Students will have the opportunity to respond to texts critically and creatively and to employ experimental or hybrid approaches to textuality, inscription processes, and book/media form and format. Course work will include reading/viewing/playing a wide range of literary texts, including experimental fiction, poetry, video, artists’ books, and new media; participating in class discussions and small group work; and producing multimodal writing. In addition to learning how to read closely and write about texts analytically in this seminar, you will learn how to do media-specific analysis, a type of analysis required by today’s multimodal environment and expanding forms of literacy. Though course content will focus primarily on literary and graphic production, the class will prepare you to write critically about many different kinds of textual/rhetorical situations and will translate well to writing assignments you may encounter in college-level courses and beyond. Both creative writers and literature students should find this course useful to their work.

Required Print Texts

Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, eds. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (print or Canvas PDFs)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
Sleeping with the Dictionary, Harryette Mullen
Full-Metal Indigiqueer, Joshua Whitehead
The Xenotext, Book 1, Christian Bök
House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition, Mark Danielewski
Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles (print or Canvas PDF)

Artists’ Books and New Media

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including
Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, Leanne Shapton
A Void, Georges Perec
Crystallography, Christian Bök
Eunoia, Christian Bök
Citizen, Claudia Rankine
Electronic Literature Collection, vols. 1, 2, and 3, co-edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg (online)
My Body: A Wunderkammer, Shelley Jackson (online)
Life is Strange, Square Enix (Feral Interactive)
What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow (Annapurna Interactive)
Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer
Patter, Douglas Kearney
A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Tom Phillips
Dakota, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (online)
Stephanie Posavec’s Literary Organisms (online)
Eroyn Franklin’s sculptural books

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40100 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Course Description: A historical survey of literary and critical theory from the Pre-Socratics to the Modern Era. Regular attendance and in-class writing are required. Class writing will be done long hand for all students (except for those with formal accommodations). Cellphone usage is not permitted in the classroom. Students will do group work and write an in-class, midterm exam and an in-class final. They will also write one formal paper of 4-5 pages. The class format is lecture with discussion. Students will gain a foundation for further literary, philosophical, and critical inquiry.

Course Text:

Vicent Leitch, et. Al, The North Anthology of Theory & Criticism

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 42429 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

Required Texts

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

Course Description

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.

Assignments

Course work will include the assigned readings; class discussions and small group problem-solving; theory journal entries; and critical/multimodal blog writing.

Evaluation

Course evaluation will be determined by writing critical/multimodal blogs, working with small group assignments, and engaging in workshops and peer response.

ENG 317 Survey: Medieval 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 42430 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 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 317.

Text: The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Literature

ENG 319 Survey: The Long 18th C. 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 41680 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 319 if you have already taken ENG 309 or 319.

The “long eighteenth century” (for our purposes, roughly 1660-1789) was a time of enormous transformations in Great Britain and the Americas. This course considers some of these social, ideological, economic, and political changes as they appear in literary texts (fiction, nonfiction, drama, and verse) in this period. Though the course will introduce a broad range of works, it will look most closely at texts that engage with questions about gender and sexuality, the relationship between nature and culture, slavery and abolition, and the rapid growth of the British Empire.

ENG 320 Survey: The Long 19th C. (TYE) 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101  

CRN: 42192 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 320 if you have already taken ENG 310 or 320. This is a Transfer Year Experience (TYE) course for incoming Fall transfer students. +1hr/wk arr

The “Other” Victorians 

The nineteenth century was an age of change and challenges to established cultural norms in Britain and beyond: the Industrial and Darwinian Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, anticolonial rebellion, and the emergence of women’s rights, among others. In 1964, scholar Stephen Marcus published The Other Victorians, a groundbreaking examination of Victorian sexuality, pornography, and flagellation that insisted upon acknowledging the revolutionary underside of Victorian culture. As Marcus’s work made clear, humans have always existed with a spectrum of desires and viewpoints, and many of those who lived and wrote in the nineteenth century did so while breaking the hegemonic cultural rules. Their literature, like their lives, was subversive, sometimes kinky, and frequently just plain weird. They, too, were Victorians.  

Content Warning: This course incorporates mature themes. Some of the texts we’ll read include representations of violence and/or sexuality. I did not assign these texts lightly. Rather, it is my goal for us to confront those elements sensitively, thoughtfully, and deeply, as I hope we do when we encounter them in the real world. Literature (in all its modalities) exists in part to help us process and cope with the realities of human crises and trauma, and in asking us to confront these things, it also actively encourages our empathy with and for others. To be a student in this class, you will need to commit to reading and discussing this material and doing so in a mature, respectful way. 

Course Objectives: 

As a Literature and Culture Requirement survey, the primary objective of this course is to give you a broader knowledge of the development of British literature over the course of the long nineteenth century, as well as the opportunity to analyze said literature with an informed understanding of the relevant cultural and historical contexts in Britain and the British Empire. By the end of the quarter, you’ll have knowledge of specific literary movements and significant innovations that emerged in the period and how they overlap, as well as of nineteenth-century British history and culture: the issues, fears, and desires that emerged in said literature.  

As a Transfer Year Experience (TYE) course, this ENG 320 also places more emphasis on writing and research than a traditional Literature and Culture survey course. This is to help you hone your critical reading and writing skills in preparation for upper-division courses in the English major at Western. Consequently, transfer students who take this ENG 320 will also fulfil their ENG 202 requirement. In our discussions of both literature and writing, we’ll focus on the relationship between form and function: the ways in which what is said connects to how it’s communicated (and why this matters). We’ll also emphasize building a strong classroom community and cohort relationships to support you as you settle in at Western.  

ENG 321 Survey: The 20-21st C. (TYE) 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101  

CRN: 41365 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Heim, Stefania

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 321 if you have already taken ENG 311 or 321. This section is for transfer students only.

Writing (and) War

“I lived in the first century of world wars” wrote American poet Muriel Rukeyser in 1968, highlighting how war seeped into both the 20th century’s poems and daily life. The genre of war writing was once imagined to take its value from proximity to the gory truths of men’s combat experience. Over the course of the 20th century, though, as legal scholar Mary Dudziak argues, wartime stopped being “an exception to normal peacetime” and became “the only kind of time we have.”

This course surveys 20th and early 21st century literature as it intersects, protests, grapples with, and is shaped by ongoing war. First, we will interrogate various visions of what war literature is, and then we will ask what it becomes when war is everywhere and always. We will consider: What forms have been created to access and express experiences that defy common meaning-making strategies? To what extent can some of the most radical writing experiments of these times be understood in relationship to conflict? We will ask difficult questions about aesthetics and violence, witness and authority. And we will interrogate constructions of combatant, civilian, enemy, self, and other, as well as intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender. Because this is a Transfer Year Experience course we will focus overtly on how we can use writing as thinking; on self-consciously developing formal assignments through drafts, peer review, and revisions; and on being attentive to the assumptions and habits behind our reading and writing practices.  

ENG 331 Studies in Gender Theory 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or WGSS 211

CRN: 42727 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Lee, Jean

Black Feminist Theory and Literature

Black women’s subjectivities contain multitudes. This complexity informs Black women’s ways of knowing, being, and acting. For instance, Black feminism and womanism’s analyses of Black women’s intersectional oppressions also produce empowering self-definitions and radical imaginaries. This class will engage with Black feminist and womanist methods and theories across disciplines and genres to interrogate how race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class inform Black feminist projects of freedom. Some topics we will cover are Black feminist epistemologies, intersectionality, embodiment, sexuality, reproductive justice, Afro-diasporic cosmologies, and activist movements.

ENG 334 Texts/N.Am&Eur: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent; GUR: BCGM

CRN: 41681 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon

Analysis primarily of North American and European texts with engagement in issues of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Repeatable once as an elective with different topics. May be taken only once for GUR credit.

ENG 335 Global Texts Outside N.Am&Eur 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent; GUR: ACGM

CRN: 44064 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am 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

ENG 338 Women's Lit N Am and Europe 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; GUR: BCGM

CRN: 40391 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Westhoff, Kami

Study of women’s texts in various cultures primarily of North America and Europe, including thematic and stylistic development within cultural context.

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40539 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Qualley, Donna

Our course focuses on contemporary literature written and published for young adults between the ages of 12-20+. In these books, you’ll meet a diverse group of young people who are wrestling with the seminal questions of identity, agency, and community. Who am I? Who are my people? Why does the world sometimes suck? What can I do about it? Because young adults themselves question, experiment, and push boundaries, it should come as no surprise that the literature written for and about young adults also pushes conventional boundaries in terms of subject matter, language, form, and craft.

Since a primary goal of this course is to expose you to a range of contemporary young adult literature, the course is reading-intensive, but I hope you will agree—also intensely interesting! In our short time together, we’ll read works of fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction in addition to some supplementary material that I will make available on Canvas. You’ll also have the opportunity to experience reading in its listening-form through two different kinds of audio reading experiences. Over the quarter, we’ll engage in multiple, short response projects (analytical and creative, individual, and collaborative) that include writing, speaking, and using visual and other non-print media. We’ll culminate the course by looking at your selected book in the context of the todays critical conversations about censorship, book banning, and cancel culture.

This course will also help you develop your own answers to questions like these:

How might young adult literature serve as a vehicle for critical and self-reflexive examination of the social, cultural, and political landscapes in which we are currently and have historically been emmeshed? How might these books offer their readers new ways to imagine and create a more just, equitable, and hopeful futures for themselves and others?
How might YA literature re-ignite an interest the habit of life-long reading? How might YA literature stimulate young people’s (and your own!) expressive and creative work?
What qualities make YA literature engaging and deserving of respect by adults (and schools) as well as young people? What kinds of discussions, assignments, and projects can open up and extend students’ understanding and enjoyment of this literature?
What are some of the critical conversations that (continue to) galvanize the field of young adult literature and the larger public?

Required Texts for Fall 2023

Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi
Mary’s Monster, by Lita Judge
Accountable: The True Story if a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed by Dashka Slater
Into the Wild Light, by Jeff Zentner

Required Audio Book

Queer Ducks & Other Animals: The Natural World of Animal Sexuality by Eliot Shrefner

Book Club Choice by CLC conference author, Tiffany D. Jackson. (Do not purchase until you attend class).

Monday’s Not Coming
Allegedly
Grown
White Smoke
The Weight of Blood

Book Choice for Final Project:

I will provide a selected list of award winning and critically acclaimed YA books for you to select from for your final inquiry project.

A Note about the Books:

Young Adult Literature is a dynamic field. I try to choose some new books every time that I teach this class. I also select books by some of the authors who will be presenting at Western’s Children and Young Adult Conference held every year at the end of February.

We will begin the course with Mary’s Monster and then move to In the Wild Light.
If you see teaching in your future, having a physical copy of each book in class is preferable because these books can become part of your future classroom library. However, for books where design and page layout are not essential to the meaning, you may use larger e-reader devices that allow you to annotate and take notes. (Please do not try to read these books on your phones).
Unless otherwise arranged, you should not use the audio book for the four required texts, the book-club choice, and your selected book for the final project.

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40163 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm 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: lots of exercises, readings, analytical discussions, group discussions, and extensive revision of your own drafts into a 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.

REQUIRED MATERIALS

Imaginative Writing, Janet Burroway, Fourth Edition (this is the only edition that will work)
Ability to print out hard copies of your work
Paper and pen or pencil for in-class writing

CRN: 40787 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Caitlin

Welcome to creative writing! This creative writing workshop course will cover prose (fiction and nonfiction) and poetry. In it, students will read a diverse range of material from each genre and will develop their own creative process and writing practice. Students will learn literary devices and employ them in their own writing, which will be workshopped. The first half of the quarter will cover prose (fiction and nonfiction); the second half will cover poetry. 

Class time will be a combination of discussion of readings assigned, in-class writing exercises, sharing of those exercises, and journaling. Fridays will be our “Writers’ Friday” day where we focus on in-class writing exercises and oral sharing of student work. Students will be workshopped once in small-group workshops (groups of 4) at the end of the quarter. 

In class discussions as well as workshops, expect to explore and discuss the following: writing technique, form, content, context, perspective, literary devices, the role of imagination, the self in relation to others, and more. By the end of the course, students will have read a wide range of poetry and prose, reviewed and employed various structures and mechanics of poetry and fiction in their own work, and critically examined their own creative process and work, as well as critically examined the work of their peers. 

CRN: 42432 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon

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: 42433 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Teer, Kaitlyn

This course is designed to introduce you to the process of writing personal essays, poems, and short stories. It will also invite you to explore hybrid genres, like prose poems, lyric essays, and flash fiction. You can look forward to reading and analyzing published creative works, identifying and describing elements of writing craft, writing from prompts, experimenting with imitation, and generating and revising creative work. Over the course of the quarter, you will write drafts of creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Your final project will ask you to fully revise and polish these works into a portfolio that includes a reflective commentary in which you consider your writing and revision processes. This course will also ask you to participate thoughtfully in a community of writers by supporting your peers’ writing goals, giving generous feedback, reading literary journals that publish emerging writers, and attending a literary event. My hope is that your own creative writing projects will be enriched by all these forms of engagement. To conclude our time together, our class will hold a reading, in which you will perform a piece from your portfolio.

CRN: 44065 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 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 foundational 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; weekly reading response work; 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
Selected texts on Canvas

OPTIONAL but recommended:

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala. 2016 edition. Paperback ISBN: ‎ 978-1611803082

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40501 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 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: 40578 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 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. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40101 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

A poet’s job is to show us that language is never all used up, never “done,” never spoiled; by putting words into new relationships with one another, we discover more ways of knowing and feeling. According to poet Marvin Bell, “What they say ‘there are no words for’—that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.” Students in this class read and write poems. We study and listen to poems from a diverse range of writers—including our peers—paying attention to how words and the poem-shapes they inhabit can matter. We explore contexts for writing (how to practice, how to revise, how to understand craft, how to participate in or push against tradition and form, how to find community) as we generate material and shape it into poems.

This section of 353 is currently being planned in hybrid modality.

ENG 354 Intro to Creative Nonfict Writ 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40102 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm 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 hybrid 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 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 40323 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

Film viewing: Mondays, 4:00-6:50pm

This course is designed to provide an introduction to the key components of film expression such as cinematography, sound, editing, and production design. We will closely analyze several canonical films from around the world, utilizing the fundamental concepts and definitions covered in the course units. Furthermore, we will explore cinema’s relationship to other arts and various media forms.  
 
More specific course objectives: 

Enrich your ability to look and listen closely to motion pictures 
Understand and apply a range of critical and cultural theories to the study of cinema 
Explore a range of film genres, national cinemas, historical periods, and auteurs, with an emphasis on expanding the frame from Hollywood to a more diverse world cinema 
Engage with local film cultures and other communities rooted in cinephilia

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 an older edition, a used copy, or the e-book version.   

CRN: 42183 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Cosey, Felicia

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

In this course we will learn how the formal elements of film practice and technique such as cinematography, editing, sound, and mise-en-scène are employed to create meaning for the spectator. Moreover, we will investigate the ways in which critical perspectives such as genre, authorship, ideology, race, sexuality, and gender inform our analyses of film and media. As part of our study, we will screen and analyze excerpts from narrative and documentary films as well as experimental media.

Assignments: Course work will consist of activities, quizzes, and writing assignments.

Textbook: Corrigan, Timothy and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2021.

ENG 365 Film Hist: Global Cinema 1960-2000 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or ENG 202

CRN: 41371 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

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

The second half of the 20th century was a pivotal period in film history. Following the emergence of several key cinematic waves and movements around the globe, the decades between 1960-2000 witnessed fundamental shifts in the way cinema functions as an art form, a tool for social change, and a commercial endeavor. The purpose of this course is to identify major films and filmmakers that have been influential in reshaping their national cinemas or establishing a film culture in countries with nascent media industries. While this time period also saw the emergence of New Hollywood and American independent cinema, our focus will be exclusively on films made outside North America.

The cinematic waves and filmmakers we will analyze include:

The French New Wave
The Japanese New Wave
The Czechoslovak New Wave
New German Cinema
The Taiwanese New Wave
5th Generation Chinese Directors
New Argentine Cinema

We will trace recurring themes, elements of film language, and production practices that were observed across a seemingly diverse range of films that belonged to the same movement. Additionally, we will re-evaluate each movement in terms of its lasting impact and legacy on contemporary world cinema.

Films:

The Insect Woman, dir. Shohei Imamura, 1963
Le Bonheur, dir. Agnès Varda, 1965
Alice in the Cities, dir. Wim Wenders, 1974
Adoption, dir. Marta Meszaros, 1975
Taipei Story, dir. Edward Yang, 1985
Raise the Red Lantern, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1991
Through the Olive Trees, dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1994
Silvia Prieto, dir. Martin Rejtman, 1999

Course readings will be made available on Canvas.

ENG 371 Rhetorical Practices 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 and junior status. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, May 11th at 4:30pm.

CRN: 44081 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Bridges, D'Angelo

Black Digital Rhetoric and Activism

Rhetoric exists all around us, especially on social media platforms where Black activists, Black organizations, and Black communities hope to effect political and cultural change in the world. In this course, we will excavate the rhetorical practices that exist in the Black digital sphere. To begin, we will study canonical ancient texts on rhetoric, the strategic use of persuasive language, to form the basis for your rhetorical knowledge. After you develop a working understanding of rhetoric, we will pivot to study the ways twenty-first century Black activists have drawn on ancient rhetorical practices in their campaigns for liberation. This work will take us to Black feminist activists, Black disability activists, Black Christian activists, and other groups to examine how Black rhetors on digital platforms like Black Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms produce alternative spaces to re-envision the landscape of their worlds. As we will witness, technology can be empowering and liberating, but it has its draw-back and constraints for minoritized groups seeking reformation in America. Our goal this semester is to understand Black digital activism and rhetoric as pervasive and, perhaps, necessary for establishing a more humane world.

400-Level English Courses

ENG 410 Lit Hist: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202; plus three from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 313, ENG 314, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320, ENG 321, ENG 331, ENG 333, ENG 334, ENG 335, ENG 336, ENG 338, ENG 339, ENG 341, ENG 342, ENG 343, ENG 347, ENG 364, ENG 371; WP3.

Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 43232 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

The American Discovery of Europe

Eurocentric accounts of the literatures of the American hemisphere (and of global modernity) begin with Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. But recent scholarship from Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians powerfully contests this narrative by telling the stories of the Indigenous people (Mexica, Maya, Inuit, Inca, and many others) who discovered Europe both before and after 1492. In this class, we will analyze the power and flaws of origin stories, and we will take an in-depth look at scholarship centering Indigenous exploration and discovery. All our texts are available as e-books with your WWU library login and as PDFs on our canvas course site. In this class, you will learn to read like a (literary) historian by developing skills in

reading dense academic texts strategically
reading colonial archives against the grain
identifying and responding to a historian’s main ideas
writing short response papers
developing and implementing discussion questions
creating critical interpretive frameworks for primary documents

This in-person class is structured as a reading group with 100+ pages of reading per week and substantive writing assignments due every week. I expect and require all students to be accountable to our learning community by showing up and actively participating in all in-person class meetings and by respecting all due dates for all assignments.

ENG 415 Special Topics in National Lit 5cr

Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 44116 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Warburton, Theresa

Studies in a variety of topics, canons or national literatures, such as Irish, Canadian, African, Native or Asian American. Repeatable once as an elective with different topics.

ENG 418 Senior Seminar: The Discourses around Disposal and Waste 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; WP3. Opens to Juniors at 4:30pm on Monday, May. 15. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40439 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony

The Discourses around Disposal and Waste

“Just because people throw it out and don’t have a use for it doesn’t mean it’s garbage”--Andy Warhol

“They go the their homes and I go to mine...which happens to be a dump. And when I say a dump I don’t mean like a shabby place, I mean an actual dump where the garbage goes and a bunch a bricks and smashed building parts. That’s what I call home..”--Wreck-It Ralph

“GEOLOGY" (Links to an external site.), n. The science of the earth's crust — to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners' tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools.” --Ambrose Bierce

“But it’s garbage!” --Rey

“I love trash” --Oscar the Grouch

This senior seminar looks at the discourses around disposal and waste. Instead of simply adopting the dominant and well-worn tropes placed in endless circulation (recycled) by neo-liberal ideological systems such as capitalism and environmentalism, we will practice reading against these systems to consider waste and its consequences, toxic and otherwise. We will look at how discourses frame what is disposed and inquire into how the consequences of waste remain a fertile area of human activity that resists being easily explained away.

ENG 418 Senior Seminar: Water in Black Diasporic Literature 5cr

CRN: 40440 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lee, Jean

Water in Black Diasporic Literature

Water is a central trope in Caribbean and African American literature. It functions as a site of memory and subject formation. Its fluidity transgresses borders and connects the globe through its currents, even bridging this world to the otherworld of the afterlife. It provides routes and roots for departing, returning, mourning, preserving, and becoming the Black diaspora in the Americas. This class will explore how oceans, rivers, mangroves, and floods inform Caribbean and African American reclamations of landcapes/seascapes, ancestral histories, and the body, while functioning as witnesses to contemporary racial injustice. We will focus on ecocritical, postcolonial, and feminist readings of Atlantic Ocean as womb and grave, mangroves as theoretical sites of rhizomatic relations, and the Gulf coast, the Lowcountry, Mississippi Delta, and Ohio River as conduits of destruction and renewal.

ENG 423 Major Authors 5cr

Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40441 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

Ella Rhoads Higginson: Major Works

CONTENT: This course looks at the writings of once celebrated but then long forgotten author Ella Rhoads Higginson, the first prominent literary writer from the Pacific Northwest and the first Poet Laureate of Washington State. Higginson was celebrated for her award-winning fiction, her lyric poetry which was set to music and performed internationally, and her prolific nonfiction. During the turn from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, readers around the world were introduced to the then-remote Pacific Northwest region by Higginson’s descriptions of majestic mountains, vast forests, and scenic waters, as well as the often difficult economic circumstances of those dwelling near Puget Sound.

We will read her major works in the order she wrote them, pay attention to their interactions with the larger culture, watch her create characters who help define the Pacific Northwest, and ask why Higginson became so famous. We will consider issues of gender, race, region, and identity, among others. We will also periodically meet in the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies and do some hands on archival work with the Ella Higginson Papers.

CRN: 42184 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher

Henry and Sarah Fielding: Major Works

In this course, we’ll be focusing closely on the writings of a pair of literary siblings. Henry Fielding has long been considered a giant in the history of fiction. His comic novels, full of bawdy jokes, harsh satire, and larger-than-life characters, transformed and redefined this genre. His early dramatic writings and his later political essays are also startlingly fresh and modern in feel even today. Fielding's sister, Sarah, on the other hand, was long neglected by literary scholars and readers alike, but in her own day she was widely-known as one of the most influential writers of satiric and sentimental fiction, and her writing retains its power to provoke emotion and pleasure.

We will read fiction, essays, and drama by this prodigious sibling pair; in the process, we'll explore a range of questions, among them these: how did these writers respond to new developments in popular and print cultures in the mid-eighteenth century? How did their writings engage with the rapidly-changing social and political world of the eighteenth century—a time when ideas about social hierarchy and gender, among other things, were in the middle of a rapid transformation? How did Henry Fielding adapt earlier literary forms to conform to his vision of a benevolent and sensual personhood? How did Sarah Fielding establish herself as a writer and a public figure in a time when this was difficult for women? Why were fiction and drama in the eighteenth century so controversial, and how did these controversies shape the trajectories of these two literary careers?

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

CRN: 42437 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

CONTENT: 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.

TEXTS: may include Crovitz and Devereaux, Grammar to Get Things Done and More Grammar to Get Things Done; Devereaux, Teaching about Dialect Variations and Language in the Secondary Classroom; Yule, Study of Language

ASSIGNMENTS: Teaching Plans; Dialect analysis; Research Project

ENG 442 Studies in Literacy 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from: ENG 202, ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 371 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, May 11th at 4:30pm.

CRN: 44083 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Qualley, Donna

What is literacy? And what does literacy do—for whom and to whom? In the first part of the course, we’ll examine literacy as the performance of a “social identity” that often involves reading and writing, but that is also coupled with distinctive ways of speaking & listening, believing & valuing, thinking & feeling, and acting & interacting with other people and with various objects, tools, and technologies. Drawing on some fascinating theories, we’ll read stories that describe how people come by their initial identities and the challenges they can experience as they transition to performing new identities associated with different social groups. We’ll explore how literacy can be used to empower and liberate as well as regulate and oppress. You’ll have an opportunity to work with these theories by exploring a literacy transition in your own or in another person’s life in a piece of non-fiction writing.

In the second part of the course, we’ll focus on the effects of changing technologies on how we think, read, and write. Plato through writing would lead to the death of thought and memory. Today, some scholars are suggesting that writing may be overtaking reading as the “literacy of consequence.” We’ll consider how digital technologies have reshaped the literacy landscape, ushering in a flurry and flowering of creative invention and production in some quarters while engendering new fears about a literacy in crisis in others. We’ll look at what it means to be networked readers and writers.

Throughout the quarter, you’ll engage in a variety of short creative and critical responses. The final project is a multimodal “rhetorical translation,” where you will design a way to communicate material from the second part of the course to a designated specific audience of non-specialists. No matter what futures you see yourself chasing after—as PWLR minors, as future teachers, as creative writers, or as literature majors—you are going to have to find ways to “translate” your knowledge and understanding to people whose life worlds and experiences are different than yours.

I’m really excited to have the opportunity to offer this course one last time. I hope you will consider joining me!

Texts:

Jason Reynolds: Long Way Down ISBN  978-1481438263 or 978-1481438254 (Print copy required, but not the graphic novel version)
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; ENG 441 or concurrent or MLE 444 or concurrent; 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; WP3

CRN: 40678 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 pm Instructor: Celaya, Anthony

Survey of theory, practice, resources and methods of assessment for the teaching of English language arts.

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 443

CRN: 40324 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am 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; reader’s reflection; activity and lesson plans; critical literacy analysis; discussion plan; teaching guide

TEXTS: may include Gallagher, Deeper Reading; Zoboi and Salaam, Punching the Air

ENG 451 Creative Wrtng Seminar:Fiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40394 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Colen, Elizabeth

In this advanced workshop in fiction writing, students will closely read and analyze books of short stories written in the last year, engage in weekly writing exercises and imitations, and hone their storytelling skills through the production of at least one fully revised story. The final project will be a portfolio that includes a story of 10-15 pages of fully revised, well-crafted work.

CRN: 40583 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Dorr, Noam

Fiction as Attention

Story is often at the center of fiction—it pulls our curiosity, propels us to seek out what happens on the next page and the next. We race through chapters to finish the novel to avoid having the ending spoiled. But what happens when we approach our fiction writing as offering a space for a different kind of curiosity, one that is rooted in acts of attention and observation? What shapes might our stories take then? How might they meander, spiral, come undone? Whether we are contemplating the observable world or speculating the fantastical, in this advanced fiction course we will play with forms of storytelling and storymaking that highlight modes of attention, of asking questions, and of slowing down and focusing on the unexpected. Students will experiment weekly with different creative practices and engage in in-depth discussions of one another’s work and our assigned readings.

ENG 453 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Poetry 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40356 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori

Creative Writing Seminar, Poetry—The Knot

The Ashley Book of Knots defines a knot as: “Any complication in a length of line.” In The Year of Knots, Wendy Chien takes this complication and details it further: “In every knot, the line will enter, travel around itself, other strands, or objects, then emerge from the knot. The line charts the journey.” A poem is an object made entirely of lines—crossing and breaking, bending and pulling, as the poem moves itself and its images down a page. In this class we will investigate poetry as the genre of the line—and as such a genre of the knot. Over the quarter we will explore the poem itself as a knot as well as how individual lines are knotted. We will examine aspects of the poem-as-knot ranging from where and why a line breaks to what makes for a source of breakage. We will chart the journey of the poetic line—mapping how it shapes syntactical identity, style, and form. Some questions that might guide our disentangling: How does erasure complicate the form of a line? Can you pinpoint who wrote a line by the bravura of the break? Have there been line trends? Can line breaks be trendy? Why break at all? We will dive deep into the lineage of the line through close reading individual poems, full collections, craft essays, and your own workshopped pieces. We will unravel endings, tie down beginnings, and tighten the middle bits as we determine what tools and moves it takes to loop a draft into a finished knot.

ENG 454 Creative Wrtg Sem: Nonfiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40395 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Jose

“Criticism in Crisis: Social Criticism in Times of Acute Disintegration

In a 1987 interview, Margaret Thatcher famously (or infamously) declared that “there is no such thing as society,” only “individual men and women and … families.” Her declaration, and her rule, along with the rule of her US counterpart Ronald Reagan, served to consolidate the neoliberal political project, one that sought to hollow out the social safety net and which used the rhetoric of personal responsibility and choice to blame individuals for their immiseration under capitalism. 

In this class, we will read texts that push back on this political project through essay. We’ll read as writers. That is, we’ll read with a special attunement for “how” questions, such as “how did X author accomplish Y?”  The literature we’ll read will engage in social criticism. That is, criticism that presupposes the existence of something called society—an organizing idea that might mean something like the mutual influence and indebtedness we bring into being through our interactions—and situates its interrogations in the interconnected web of political, economic, and cultural relations. Writers we’ll read in this class grapple with a plethora of social problematics, and students in this class will be asked to write two short pieces of social criticism that engage in different literary modes.

Our class will primarily be workshop based. But students will also watch films, lead reading discussions, engage in short in-class writing exercises, and write two pieces of social criticism based on our study of the genre.

Some of the writers we’ll read in the course will include: James Baldwin, Eula Biss, John Berger, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Susan Sontag, Kiese Laymon, and Robin Wall Kimmerer

ENG 456 Special Topics Fiction Writing: Cli-Fi 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 43237 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Magee, Kelly

Cli-Fi is an advanced course in fiction writing, on the subject of climate change—from monster storms and rising sea levels to techno-worlds and speculative futures. Most fiction attends to setting in some way, but in this class, we’ll specifically focus on it, reading and writing stories that intrinsically connect characters to their environment. You’ll produce exercises in a range of fictional subgenres, as well as full-length stories, and writers of realism are just as welcome as science fiction enthusiasts. We’ll study popular tropes in climate writing, including variations on the ever-popular post-apocalypse story, as well as new developments, especially how writers connect this genre to political and social movements in the U.S. and abroad. Mostly, we’ll experiment with cli-fi as a unique form of writing, whether to serve as a warning or source of hope. The class will be driven by two parts: the creative writing you produce and the analysis of other writers’ texts, both published and peer-written.

ENG 458 Nonfiction Wrtg: Visual Autobiography 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40408 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Roach Orduna, Jose

Visual Autobiography

Autobiography and images can be friends or foes. In this class we will examine the ways autobiography and images stake claims in truth, life, and art. In many ways this is a hybrid course: it’s not a course in visual theory, but we’ll be reading some well-known theorists like Teju Cole, and Roland Barthes; it’s not a film class, but we’ll be watching and discussing films by Ross McElwee, John Akomfrah, and Agnes Varda; it’s also not a graphic memoir class but we’ll be reading graphic memoirs by Alison Bechdel, and Marjane Satrapi. The goal of the class is to create a visual/verbal laboratory where theory and practice can come together to make art based on life. Our throughline will be how the visual can work in tandem with the written word to become an expression/examination of self and society.

Most of all I want the class to be generative. We’ll be reading, viewing and discussing, but we’ll also be doing a lot of doing. We’ll use cameras, drawing, old postcards, photos, home movies, and other visual elements to say something about our lives. We will have many short exercises and one longer piece of visual autobiography due near the end of the term.

Required Texts:

Blind Spot by Teju Cole
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

ENG 459 Editing and Publishing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40579 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Gulyas, Lee

TEXTS

Friedman, Jane. The Business Of Being A Writer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780226393162
Saller, Carol Fisher. The Subversive Copy Editor. Second Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780226240077

COURSE GOALS

This is a capstone course that offers an overview of publishing in the United States. Our explorations include the history of publishing; the wide variety of publishing houses and presses; literary careers and the business of publishing; and the literary Northwest.

As upper-level writing students, you will:

explore the world of publishing and its place in our culture.
be introduced to skills including research, sources, copyediting, and proofreading, and be aware of the current literary conversation, discourses, and cultures of editing and publishing.
consider writing from the perspective of writer, editor, and publisher within the context of the industry, and be familiar with the roles of each.
understand how a book is made—from inception, to production, distribution, and promotion.
be familiar with some of the ethical issues and current trends in publishing, the politics of book buying, and how to engage and flourish as a member of a larger literary community.
actively work to increase your knowledge and skills and aim for professional standards.

ENG 460 MultiGenrWrit 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 40487 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

Intensive study of topics in creative writing that cross genre boundaries, or that critique those boundaries. Opportunities to compose experimental or hybrid works. Repeatable with different instructors to a maximum of 10 credits.

CRN: 42009 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Yeasting, Jeanne

PROSE/POETRY

CONTENT: This course will focus on creating and revising prose poetry, lyric creative nonfiction, and hybrids of the two. We’ll investigate the line is between prose and poetry, and explore the boundaries between "regular" poetry with line breaks, prose poetry, and “poetic" creative nonfiction. We’ll read the work of some earlier practitioners of these forms, as well as contemporary authors. Class will include a mixture of discussion of assigned writing models, writing exercises, and workshops.

ASSIGNMENTS: Assignments include considerable reading of writing models; weekly writing and revising of prose poetry, lyric creative nonfiction, and/or hybrids; giving detailed peer feedback (writing and spoken) using guidelines; weekly reading response work; and completing a Final project.  Students may be required to work on a collaborative project and/or conduct research.

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

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Ray Gonzalez, ed. No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 Americans. Tupelo Press (2003). Paperback ISBN: 978-1932195019
Carol Guess, Doll Studies: Forensics. Black Lawrence Press (2012). Paperback: ISBN: 978-1936873166
Anna Maria Hong, H & G. Sidebrow Books (2018). Paperback ISBN: 978-1940090085
Maggie Nelson, Bluets. Wave Books (2009). Paperback ISBN: 978-1933517407
Selected texts and handouts on Canvas

ENG 462 Technical Writer as Naturalist 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 371; or equivalent experience and instructor approval; WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, May 11th at 4:30pm.

CRN: 41373 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

Technical Writer as Naturalist

Being a naturalist writer involves communication about the natural world based on close observation. Such close observation leads to complex and otherwise inaccessible content wanting to be communicated to audiences often far removed in time, space and cultures. As wordsmiths, the balance to be achieved for technical writers as naturalists is the ability to present detailed observations of the natural world without sacrificing readability and losing touch with the nature and culture of the world under translation. Achieving such balance in the human-nature (intra)action of communication is what this course is about.

Through place-based multi media writing activities and projects, this course informs writing at the intersections of the Humanities, STEM, Environmental Education, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and Advocacy. To build our understanding of technical writers as naturalists we will look to writers from ancient Egypt to modern day Alaska and times and places in-between. While there is certainly a canon of classical naturalists to learn more about, we will lean into the achievements of many that have been overlooked. The experience of this class will be relevant to anyone wanting to participate in the understanding articulated by Muriel Rukeyser that, “the world is made of stories, not of atoms.”

There’s a number of parts shaping this writing- and design-centered course:

PLACE: Place-based writing explores a particular place through the physical environment and the cultural contexts at work in that environment. Sehome Hill Arboretum is the “place” we will explore, learn from, and take action with in this course. Fall is a great time to get to know the Arboretum more and writing is a good way to get to know and care about a place.

MEDIA: The Sehome Hill Arboretum website is under construction, as well as other built environments at Western towards shaping an interface for connecting humans more to nature. By contributing to this content development, we will build upon a longstanding tradition of writers writing at the interface of nature, humans, and culture. The course will explore being a technical writer AND naturalist with all kinds of media and forms of “writing” to express Sehome Hill Arboretum to the public, including image, sound, text, and video. We will be learning with and practicing a range of genres including environmental impacts statements, field guides, interpretive materials, poetry, literature, soundscapes, maps, and more. Projects will be student-directed around interests and skills.

ACCESSIBLE DESIGN: Accessibility matters to the technical writer as naturalist, as human-nature and human-technology interfaces have been tied up in accessibility challenges and opportunities for quite some time. Accessible design is a big part of this course. A core problem/needs for the course is how to preserve and protect Sehome Hill Arboretum while also making the public space accessible to ALL — physically and/or through a range of accessible interfaces, perhaps including digital nature.

ECOLOGICAL THINKING: Ecological thinking is a habit of mind that nature is not something apart from humans. As technical writers, designers, and storytellers, we will come to understand ourselves as a part of nature — as co-communicators and advocates.

ENG 464 Film Stds: Queer Experimental Film 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission; WP3

CRN: 40488 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Youmans, Greg

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

The course explores the relationship between queer identities and experiences on the one hand and experimental cinematic form on the other. Over the course of ten weeks, we will look closely at the films, videos, and other media works of a number of significant LGBTQ+ artists, contextualized through advanced readings in queer film and media studies. Artists whose work we will explore include Jean Cocteau, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Hammer, Isaac Julien, Malic Amalya, and Eric Cho.

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, May. 16, at 10:00am.

CRN: 44112 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Youmans, Greg

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

The course is an introduction to screenwriting with an emphasis on the art of storytelling. We will focus on the construction of both short and feature-length projects. To guide our efforts, we will explore and analyze a range of examples, both as screenplays and as final films, ranging from art cinema to quirky indies to mainstream Hollywood movies. Although our focus will be on linear narrative storytelling for film, we may also look at examples of screenwriting for other genres and formats, such as television 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 work on outside of class. The term will culminate in substantial work toward an independent project: either a treatment and at least three polished scenes of a feature-length screenplay, or a treatment and full polished screenplay of a short film.

ENG 497D Disability and Literature 5cr

CRN: 44361 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Giffen, Allison

Representing Disability in Nineteenth-Century US Literature 

This course will introduce you to some of the foundational scholarship in Critical Disability Studies specifically as it pertains to literature and the cultural work of disability.  Focusing specifically on nineteenth-century US literature, we will explore representations of people with disabilities in literature, social perceptions of disability, and the perspective of writers with disabilities. One of the central goals of this course is to explore disability as a social construction and then investigate its fascinating intersections with other identity categories, including race, class, gender, and age. The nineteenth-century offers us an especially rich cultural moment when identities like disability, childhood, and blackness and whiteness were becoming codified by way of enlightenment rationality, empirical science, and the nineteenth-century’s drive to classify. We will examine these intersecting and mutually constitutive identities as they are represented in short stories, poetry, and memoir. We will look to primary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Dave, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Packard, along with a variety of short stories published in St. Nicholas Magazine, an influential children’s periodical. And, we will read these primary materials alongside such disability scholars as Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Douglas C. Baynton, Nirmala Erevelles, And Mitchell and Snyder.

Along with introducing you to Critical Disability Studies in the context of nineteenth-century US literature, my goals are to provide you with the opportunity to develop the necessary research and writing skills to produce a 10-12-page research essay that relies on the academic conventions of literary studies.

Graduate Level English Courses

ENG 500 Directed Independent Study 1 TO 5cr

CRN: 40173

ENG 501 Literary Theories & Practices 5cr

CRN: 40002 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Vulic, Kathryn

Course Description: This course is designed to introduce you, a new Master’s-level student, to your new role and program while also preparing you for further graduate-level study. Graduate school, among its many qualities, helps students deepen their knowledge and skills in their chosen field(s), and gives them the tools they need to function as professionals in their discipline. This class will therefore focus on both of these two areas in order to launch you successfully into your graduate program.

First, we will study a selection of influential critical theories and work with them in projects that give you advanced experience using theory to craft and support arguments. One 10-week course can’t hope to cover all of literary and cultural theory, but you will gain experience with significant representative samples that will help you determine which approaches are most in line with your own scholarly identity.

Second (and completely related), the course will equip you with the professional skills you will need through and after your graduate program. We will cover how to write for different specific publication or presentation opportunities, but also the less concrete aspects of academic culture that are extremely difficult to learn without the guidance of someone who has prior experience. We will be treating the classroom as a professional workplace so that you can start inhabiting the role of professional scholar from day one. I take my role as professional mentor very seriously, and I expect that class will be a supportive and collaborative space within which we will do our work.

ENG 506 Multigenre: The Art of Play 5cr

CRN: 42190 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew. –Julio Cortázar

A challenge of taking ourselves seriously as writers is we become so focused on perfecting our craft that we lose the wonder and risk-taking of being beginners. This course is all about beginning again—inviting playfulness and messiness back into our artistic practice. Through constraints offered by forms that live off the page, we will ask how our writing changes when we engage with physical movement, prioritize other sensory modes, and delve into material-making processes. Over the course of the quarter, we will borrow from the performing arts (music, dance, theater), visual arts, digital media and other practices to redraw our horizon and imagine our work into and out of unexpected containers. As we engage with open-ended play we will continuously ask how these experiments return us back to our writing and obsessions as altered artists.

ENG 509 Intrnship in Writ, Edit & Prod 1 TO 5cr

CRN: 40118

ENG 513 Seminar in Tchg College Comp 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: appointment as a teaching assistant or instructor permission

CRN: 40119 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Cushman, Jeremy

ENG 513 is what some folks in my field have called the impossible: a practicum for grad students in the teaching of college composition. Why does is it get dubbed impossible? For lots of reasons, I suppose. I can’t list them all here, but a good way to start thinking about this impossibility is simply to try and define “composition” for yourself. What does in mean in a 21st century classroom? What’s the process underlying composing? What does a composition look like? In other words, how does one learn to teach relatively new college students a diverse activity that is also a kind of nebulous noun. It’s hard to say exactly how one does such a thing. Still, much of this class is to recognize that impossibility and proclaim “challenge accepted!”

So we’ll look to historical definitions of composition, and we’ll put those up against more contemporary questions and concerns as we work to better understand what you are doing in your own composition classrooms. What that means is that, together, we’ll try on some of the assignments that our students do, we’ll ask questions and write responses concerning how and why we might create better assignments, and we’ll reflect on the place of our college composition course in the university.

What’s more, we’ll spend a good deal of time together working through the relationship between rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. The goal here is to ground both your thinking about composition and your developing pedagogical style in the imaginative and productive questions that, I think, grow out of an authentic engagement with rhetoric and composition (both ancient and contemporary approaches).

Clearly, it’s a busy class. And while teaching composition may very well be impossible, we’ll still build a few practical paths through the strange project of teaching as a graduate student.

ENG 525 Fiction: Extreme States 5cr

CRN: 42739 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Trueblood, Kathryn

English 525: Extreme States: Fiction and Memoir

This is a class that will explore how extreme states are portrayed in language, including but not limited to madness, addiction, trauma, and illness. Because this course combines literary seminar and studio practice, you will have the opportunity to look closely at some of the tools used to convey altered states—for instance, floating fragments, prolepsis, missing pieces of narrative, and meta-writing—and then try your hand at using them. Special attention will be paid to the cultural theories surrounding extreme states, and how this list of writers have challenged those assumptions. We will be engaging with flexible forms that treat the membrane between non-fiction and fiction as permeable, such as the lyric essay, the linked collection, and the poetic novel. Students of many genres are welcome! Assignments: An in-class craft talk; a book review to be published as either a blog, a podcast, or an Amazon or Goodreads post; peer reviews; a final portfolio of exercises, a conference.

Texts:

The Collected Schizophrenias— Esme Wang (memoir)
The Things They Carried—Tim O’Brien (fictional memoir)
Jesus’s Son—Denis Johnson (story collection)
The Two Kinds of Decay—Sarah Mancuso (essay-memoir)

ENG 535 Studies in Nonfiction 5cr

CRN: 43238 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Miller, Brenda

Autobiography and photography are naturally allied; both a claim a stance in the “real world” while using figurative techniques to represent that reality. In this course, we will inquire into the nature of that alliance, examining how time, memory, the use of the frame, narrative perspective, and unexpected details function in both genres. We will study the conversation between text and image, between narrators and image, and between narrators and their own memories. We will look at how autobiographers have used photographs within their texts, and we will study how photographers create autobiographies (or biographies) through visual images. We will take lots of photographs for our class projects, and we will also inquire in to the nature of “looking” itself.

Texts:

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, Dorothy Allison
Half in Shade, Judith Kitchen
Excerpts from other works on Canvas
The work of photographers you will choose

Fall 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

Major Restrictions have been lifted from all Fall 2023 English Courses!

100-Level English Courses

ENG 100 Intro to College Writing 5cr

CRN: 40039 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Lucchesi, Andrew

CRN: 40286 DAY/TIME: MTWRF 09:00-09:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU 5cr

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 WritinHumanit: 5cr

CRN: 40724 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

CRN: 40162 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Caitlin

CRN: 40288 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Lester, Mark

CRN: 40413 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Weed, Katie

CRN: 40723 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark

CRN: 41384 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony

CRN: 41677 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: TBD

CRN: 41997 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Weed, Katie

ENG 203 Writing for Public and Professional Audiences 5cr

CRN: 42725 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Brown, Nicole

ENG 227 Queer Literature 5cr

CRN: 41138 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Guess, Carol

ENG 234 African-American Literature 5cr

CRN: 44062 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: TBD

ENG 235 Native/Indigenous Literatures 5cr

CRN: 41678 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Warburton, Theresa

ENG 236 Asian American Literatures 5cr

CRN: 44063 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

ENG 282 Global Lits: 5cr

CRN: 42180 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Wise, Christopher

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg&Public: 5cr

CRN: 40098 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 pm Instructor: Celaya, Anthony

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

CRN: 40099 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 40330 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 40390 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 40402 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon

CRN: 40481 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel

CRN: 40528 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel

CRN: 44201 Staff Poulsbo Campus - State Supported

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

CRN: 41341 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Vulic, Kathryn

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5cr

CRN: 41342 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

CRN: 41343 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5cr

CRN: 41344 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

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

CRN: 41345 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

CRN: 40100 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Wise, Christopher

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

CRN: 42429 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn

ENG 317 Survey: Medieval 5cr

CRN: 42430 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy

ENG 319 Survey: The Long 18th C. 5cr

CRN: 41680 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher

ENG 320 Survey: The Long 19th C. (TYE) 5cr

CRN: 42192 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Anderson, Katherine

ENG 321 Survey: The 20-21st C. (TYE) 5cr

CRN: 41365 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Heim, Stefania

ENG 331 Studies in Gender Theory 5cr

CRN: 42727 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Lee, Jean

ENG 334 Texts/N.Am&Eur: 5cr

CRN: 41681 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon

ENG 335 Global Texts Outside N.Am&Eur 5cr

CRN: 44064 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony

ENG 338 Women's Lit N Am and Europe 5cr

CRN: 40391 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Westhoff, Kami

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

CRN: 40539 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Qualley, Donna

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr