Spring 2023 Course Descriptions

100-Level English Courses

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU

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

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

OVERRIDES / CAPACITY OVERRIDES ARE NEVER GRANTED FOR ENGLISH 101.

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 Writ in Hum: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or 4/5 AP English Language Exam. GUR: CCOM.

CRN: 22276 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

Advanced instruction and practice in writing using ideas, texts and questions from a specified topic in the humanities. Areas and focus vary with section.

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101.

CRN: 20128 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

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

CRN: 20245 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

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

CRN: 20682 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

Seeing, Remembering, and Futurity

In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about literary works exploring memory, awareness, and speculation. We’ll read the novel The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera, the book of poems Patriarchy Blues by Rena Priest, and selected short stories from two anthologies of speculative fiction: Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures and A People's Future of the United States. We will approach these texts analytically, exploring how authorial intention can shape a text, while identifying themes, literary devices, and making arguments about texts.

CRN: 20688 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

This section of English 202 involves critical inquiry into the literary effect of “speculative fiction,” which for our purposes we can define as the literatures of the imagination: fantasy, science-fiction, horror, alternate history. Such fiction has become arguably the dominant mode of contemporary narrative production, so there is rich opportunity to explore the power these literatures have had on history and culture. The specific forms we will study will of course include the written word, but because so much of our contemporary culture is expressed and reflected in the visual realm, we will be making constant connection to TV, film, comics, and game narratives in our inquiries.  

All of our study will assume that whatever form it takes, fictional narrative has the power to construct and inform our worldly experience, even our reality. To sometimes great extent, we model our identities on literary stories, and build our perspectives from them. By making connection to our experiences and histories, stories illuminate the world, permitting us to see more texture and variety and possibility in our lives. Through intensive reading, discussion, activity, and writing we will further develop our ability to make meaning from the texts we study, focusing our analyses through formal critical practices as well as rigorous play and experimentation. You will emerge from the course a stronger analytic writer and reader with greater appreciation of the power of literature to bring you to deeper self-knowledge and increased awareness of a wider, richer, more complex world. 

TEXTS: Piranesi, Susanna Clarke, The Starship and the Canoe, Kenneth Brower, Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy, The Time Machine, HG Wells, Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller 

ASSIGNMENTS: In addition to reading assignments and participation in class activities, requirements will comprise one formal analytical paper, several informal writing assignments, and a final project.  

CRN: 20689 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven L.

Love and Longing in Literature

Writers are commonly taught that “A character is one who wants.” This wanting can be driven by something or someone a character longs for, or an absence or lack the character seeks to fill. In this course we’ll examine a variety of the forms of love and longing that motivate and drive characters, including love for people, ideas and pastimes. Along the way we’ll consider how our identities are linked to what we love and long for. Course work includes active discussion of course texts, close reading, and formal and informal writing—personal, exploratory and analytical—about literature.

Course texts include Toni Morrison, Jazz; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Tim Winton, Breath; Ward, Sing Unburied Sing.

Class content contains adult language and themes including depictions of sexuality, suicide and racism.

CRN: 21136 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony Alan

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: 21993 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

ENG 214 Shakespeare 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: HUM.

CRN: 20390 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

In this course –– a survey of the playwright’s comedies, histories, romances and tragedies –– we will explore how our experiences enable us to interpret Shakespeare, how performance or enactment necessitates interpretation, and at the same time how the works themselves inform or influence our experience. While our focus will be on what might be called the presence of Shakespeare in the contemporary world, we will also consider the historical situation in which the plays were written and first performed. The course will involve reading, analysis, discussion, performance, and the viewing of film or video productions of Shakespeare’s work.

Evaluation: Midterm and final exams; reading quizzes; group projects (performance); short written assignments

Texts

The Arden Shakespeare, third series (Bloomsbury Publishing): Romeo and Juliet (978-1408151976); As You Like It (978-1408142783); Richard III (978-1408143148); Hamlet (978-1472518385); The Tempest (978-1408139318).

ENG 234 African-American Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: BCGM.

CRN: 23651 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Lee, Jean

Introduction to African American Literature

It’s quite astonishing that there are records of African American writing from before the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), especially as many colonies instituted laws forbidding enslaved people from learning or teaching to read or write. Given that their literacy was a source of, as well as impediment, to their resistance, the oral tradition has been central to African American culture. In this course, we will explore how African Americans have been speaking back to their conditions of oppression, especially by bringing together the oral and the written, to create their own transcendent literary traditions. We will explore oral genres such as speeches, spirituals, and podcasts. We will also analyze how writers bring the dynamism of speech into literary expression through pamphlets, essays, poetry, and novels. Throughout the quarter, we will also query how African American writers strategically conform to and deconstruct normative ideals that are often exclusionary, and how they approach religion as a site of contestation and self-discovery. 

ENG 236 Asian American Literatures 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: BCGM.

CRN: 21712 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Yu, Ning

Asian American Experience through Literature

We will start with a review of something occurred in UCLA back in 2011, and then try to interpret the event with the help of Gary Okihiro's theory on "margins and mainstreams," and then we will study five verbal and four visual texts closely, looking for patterns of presentation. Eventually, students may want to change the cliche of "the big melting pot" into a less violent metaphor, a huge salad bowl for example, and they will learn to appreciate the truly diverse nature, especially the bitter sweetness of an Asian American flavor.

ENG 238 Society through its Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: HUM.

CRN: 23845 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

A thematic approach to literature, with different themes exploring the relationship between literary forms and society. Repeatable once as an elective with different topics. May be taken only once for GUR credit.

ENG 282 Global Literatures 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: GUR: HUM.

CRN: 23844 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

Analysis, interpretation and discussion of a range of texts in global literatures with attention to cultural contexts.

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg Stds: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior status; or instructor permission. GUR: WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Feb 23rd at 4:30pm.

CRN: 20075 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Cushman, Jeremy W.

Video Essays: Writing & the Body

The thing about Video Essays...well, one thing about Video Essays is they refuse to shy away from the fact that writing is embodied. Writing, especially writing meant to address a relatively large or abstract public, can feel disembodied. Indeed, writing for abstract publics can feel like it requires a writer to purposefully ignore their own body so they can participate in a "reasonable" or "logical" discourse that's devoid of all those pesky bodily "problems." Supposed problems like an itchy nose, blushing, elevated heart rate, sweat, shape, sex/gender identification, racial identification, visible disability, and on and on.

That which is so tied to the body seems to be out of place in writing for a relatively large or abstract public. Writing for a public does seem to assume or even require a more abstract body, but, of course, an "abstract body" is never abstract. An abstract body is also an actual body, one that is elite, white, "able," and more often than not, male—it's a body that doesn't get named or marked. It's the body of "reasonable," "logical" writing.

Then there's Video Essays! A kind of writing that foregrounds the body. For example, ContraPoints or Philosophy Tube or, a little differently, Bitchin' all offer insightful, biting, often beautiful writing. And because they're written as Video Essays, they foreground the body, which no matter how invisible or abstract or unmarked, is always involved in writing. Foregrounding the body changes and challenges writing to or for a public.

So, together, we'll obsess about Video Essays. We'll watch/read them, we'll compare and question them, we'll track the ways they circulate, and of course, we'll make them! Please know that you'll need zero technology chops. We'll learn how best to make these together, and we'll get heaps of help from all the WWU recourses available to us.

In the end, my hope is that we'll create a 'writing culture' where you can stretch your understanding of writing for the public and engage in a kind of public writing of which you can be super proud.

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior standing. GUR: WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Feb 23rd at 4:30pm.

CRN: 20140 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

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: 20326 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

CRN: 20393 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: 20417 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 20447 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

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

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

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

CRN: 20535 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Feb 23rd at 9am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Feb. 27, at 9:00am.

CRN: 22639 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

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

Text: The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Literature.

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Feb 23rd at 9am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Feb. 27, at 9:00am.

CRN: 22281 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

CONTENT: Using texts from the late fifteenth century through the early eighteenth century, this course focuses on writings of exploration, conquest, and European imperialism in colonial contact zones. We will draw on a wide range of genres including journals, poems, narratives, sermons, and diaries. We will consider how these various genres challenge our definition(s) of "American" literature(s) and we will examine roles of female discourse, race, religion, and class. We will explore the various ways in which America and American identities are defined, wonder about the tensions between sociopolitical position and discourse, and attempt to arrive at a deeper understanding of influences that shaped American writings during the encounter era.

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 ten page critical research paper that engages with current scholarship on an early modern 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

EVALUATION: 75% of your final grade in this course will be based on revised versions of writing assignments. The remaining 25% will be based on class participation and attendance.

TEXTS: The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, Volume A. (ISBN 978-1-55481-464-0)

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Feb 23rd at 9am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Feb. 27, at 9:00am.

CRN: 21371 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

The long eighteenth century in Great Britain used to be thought of as a time of religious reconciliation. After the bloody religious conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s—which claimed tens of thousands of lives--the decades that followed have often been seen as a time of reconciliation. In this course we’ll challenge that assumption: this period’s writing and thought are still characterized by a conflicts between competing versions of Christianity, as well as by emerging forms of religious skepticism (including both deism and outright atheism), as well as an ongoing interest in supposedly “exotic” religious practices and beliefs found in Asia and among indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Pacific. 

These topics were of course addressed in somewhat dry theological works and sermons. We’ll look at a few of those, but most of our attention will go to the vibrant works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography that characterize this period. While the reading list is still taking shape, we will certainly engage with writings by Aphra Behn, this period’s most prominent female playwright and poet; John Milton, John Dryden, Anne Finch, and Alexander Pope, brilliant and controversial poets whose writing struggled over the relationship between religious belief and political life; Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved writer and political activist; and Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet whose writing challenged readers on both sides of the Atlantic.  

No special knowledge of Christianity or other religious traditions is needed for this course—lectures and readings will give you all the information you need. It should also be clear that no religious belief (or nonbelief) is expected, though respect for the beliefs of others in the classroom is of course a basic requirement of this course (as for any course at WWU). 

Course requirements will likely include regular engagement in class meetings; several informal response papers (2-3 paragraphs); and a longer culminating writing project. 

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Creative writers without an endorsement will be able to register after Thursday, Feb 23rd at 9am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Monday, Feb. 27, at 9:00am.

CRN: 21373 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

Literature and the Laying Bare of the Mythology of the Subject 1939-1969

Confronting the devastation of the Second World War as well as the new reality of a nuclear age and an escalating Cold War, the Western powers of the mid-twentieth century went to considerable lengths to assure their uneasy, more or less traumatized if not entirely dispirited populations that the hardships they had endured and sacrifices they had made had been both meaningful and worthwhile—that the cultural institutions and liberal humanist values associated with the West could and would continue to be a source of hope and inspiration. In this course, we will examine works by a number of authors writing in English and French during the period 1939-1969 that are marked by skepticism with respect to the celebration of Western values or that repudiate the humanist conception of the self. What is surprising is that these works are not (or are not always) cynical. Though dismissive of promises of personal fulfillment grounded in the tenets of consumerism, political assurances of greater individual freedom (offered by either the right or he left), or the promotion of an indomitable, incontestable faith in scientific and technological salvation, each presents at least the prospect of thinking, of being otherwise. The texts are not without humor.

Texts

Gertrude Stein, Ida (ISBN: 978-0300169768); Samuel Beckett, Watt (ISBN: 978-0802144485); Boris Vian, Mood Indigo (ISBN: 978-0374534226); Georges Perec, Life, A User’s Manual (ISBN: 978-1567923735); Ann Quin, Passages (ISBN: 978-1564782793).

CRN: 23848 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori

Reframing/Reclaiming/Retelling

“Where’s the edge? Where does the frame start?” Taking a cue from one of Brian Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies cards, this course will focus on writers whose work reconsiders the frame—from a queer retelling of a Greek myth, to a radical revisioning of a government document, to a cultural history reimagined as hybrid fairy tale poems, to narratives that riff and repeat themselves to reclaim and reconsider perspective. Over the span of the quarter, and across genre and form, we will investigate questions of who gets to tell or retell a story, how it is told, and the implications of the work of reframing. Some artists we will consider include Carmen Maria Machado, Jessica Q. Stark, Anne Carson, Renee Gladman, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Raymond Queneau, Kara Walker, Layli Long Soldier, Elissa Washuta, and Harryette Mullen.

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20076 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony Alan

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

CRN: 23655 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Yu, Ning

Introduction to a range of critical and cultural theories in historical context up to the nineteenth century. Emphasis on critical reading and writing in preparation for courses in film, literature, and cultural studies.

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 22643 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn Y.

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

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

ENG 317 Survey: Medieval 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 22753 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

One of the most dynamic fields in literature today is the exploration of global medieval literature. From the rolling hills of England to the roots of medieval Japan, this course takes us through the widespread and emerging understanding of how these stories speak to each other across time and space. Beginning in our own back yard with the tales and legends of the Lummi and the Nooksack, we’ll wrestle a dragon with Beowulf, roam the deserts of the Middle East with Ibn Fadlan, witness the rise of the samurai in feudal Japan, and marvel at the wonders of the world’s great library at Timbuktu. The tales told by these remarkable people continue to delight, and underline the common humanity that unites us all.

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 22646 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

Global Baroque

In this class, we take up the Baroque as a lens for exploring 17th-century texts shaped by the rise of absolutist states, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, European invasions of Africa and the Americas, and the early glimmers of a secular scientific revolution. We will put into conversation baroque texts produced across Europe and the Americas. Authors may include Miguel de Cervantes, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Richard Hakluyt, Margaret Cavendish, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and others.

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

ENG 319 Survey: The Long 18th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 21374 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

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 334 TextsAcrossNAm&Eur: 5cr

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

CRN: 21741 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm. Film Screening: W 5:00-7:50 pm. Instructor: Youmans, Greg

Surrealisms

This course explores the origins, legacies, and ongoing significance of what was probably the most influential avant-garde movement of the 20th century: surrealism. We’ll begin by looking at the ideas of Sigmund Freud about drives, dreams, and the unconscious, along with the writings of André Breton that defined and launched the movement. After that we’ll engage with a range of artists working in a variety of media, including literature and the visual arts though focusing mainly on film. Some of the artists whose work we’ll explore are Luis Buñuel, Aimé Césaire, Věra Chytilová, Leonora Carrington, Jan Švankmajer, David Lynch, and Donald Glover. This is a GUR course satisfying the BCGM requirement, meaning that there is a primary emphasis on North American and European subject matter and on approaches drawn from comparative, gender, and multicultural studies. Throughout the term, we’ll consider surrealism’s relationship to colonialism and anticolonialism, feminist and queer politics, and struggles for racial justice.

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

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

CRN: 23110 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

Archival Encounters

In this class, we consider archives as colonialist projects and as sites of anti-colonial critique. We will put into conversation works from writers of the American hemisphere who fictionalize or theorize archival encounters. Authors may include Daniel Munduruku, Reinaldo Arenas, Maryse Condé, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and others.

This is a synchronous class, and attendance is required. Students will be responsible for completing 40-50 pages of reading before each class session, and they will be expected to turn in reading quizzes or group activity reports during each class meeting. Assignments outside of class include responses to close reading prompts and reflection questions. These activities are bookended by archival encounters closer to home as students look to the “Bellingham from Below Virtual Tour” by historian Josh Cerretti and Talking to Crows as a lens for creating a final project based on materials in WWU’s Special collections.

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

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. GUR: BCGM.

CRN: 20403 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

Students in English 338 study literature by writers who identify as women (writing that has been historically sidelined from the literary canon) and consider literary production and culture through the lens of gender. In this section of Women & Literature we approach our topic through the works of three renowned authors, acclaimed not only for their creative writing (poems, memoirs, stories) but also for their groundbreaking publications on the material and labor conditions of the woman writer (Virginia Woolf); intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies (Audre Lorde); and the postcolonial re-claiming of silenced indigenous experience and forms of expression (Joy Harjo).

This section is currently being planned as a mixed-modality synchronous and asynchronous course; assignments and evaluation will be posted on Canvas before the quarter begins. You’ll need to be able to independently organize your time to move through a sequence of activities and assignments each week and to attend infrequent synchronous meetings. Please save our assigned meeting time (MWF 10-11:20) on your calendar until the list of synchronous dates is posted on Canvas.

Required Textbooks
Please note that the paperback (not digital) editions listed below are required. Purchase texts early for less-expensive used editions and consider buying through your local independent seller or campus store.

Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (Roxane Gay, ed), Norton. 978-1324004615
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Mariner annotated edition. 978-0156030410
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Mariner annotated edition. 978-0156030359
Gloria Bird & Joy Harjo (eds), Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America, Norton. 978-0393318289
+ supplemental reading (through Canvas) from Joy Harjo

ENG 342 Studies in Literary Genres 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 22282 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori

Notes, Notebooks, Lists: Ephemeral Forms
The note is often imagined as preliminary—an idea sketched out that later is abandoned or expanded until it turns into a more polished or publishable form. However, Mary Capello argues that “notes are a matter of life and death, as Audre Lorde reminds us, the nonperson is she of whom it will be said ‘no note taken...’” This course takes up the note as a necessary literary form—offering artists, writers, and theorists a place to radically explore consciousness, history, gender, race, culture, and one’s place in space in time. Over the quarter we will delve into the note as a form particularly invested in process and attempt—taking shape as lists, meditations, fragments, aphorisms, memos, as well as hypothetical books. Taking into consideration who notes and how, we will close read various forms of the published note—from first-person documentary examples, to lectures, diaries, novels, essays, and other less easily categorized forms—investigating what it means to notice or to be allowed to take note. We will also take note ourselves—through the act of keeping a notebook and experimenting with the possibilities that notation might offer literary criticism. Some artists and thinkers we will consider include: Sei Shonagan, Alba de Céspedes, Julio Cortázar, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Roland Barthes, Hervé Guibert, Bhanu Kapil, Eula Biss, Renee Gladman, Chantel Akerman, Moyra Davey, Christina Sharpe, Kate Zambreno, and Jenny Boully.

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20381 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

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

TEXTS: may include Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter; Quintero, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces; Shusterman, Challenger Deep; Tamaki, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me; Zoboi and Salaam, Punching the Air

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

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20141 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

In this course we will explore, discuss, practice and revise forms of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction. I'll introduce you to exercises in ekphrasis (writing about art), traditional forms, poetry machines and current trends in contemporary poetics (visual poetry, collaborative writing methods, conceptual writing, multilingual pieces.). While we all will work remotely, everyone will be required to participate each week in small group discussion forums to read and responds to assignments and complete attentive peer reviews. This course uses Imaginative Writing (4th ed.) as a main text, and I will offer other documents and sources on Canvas.

CRN: 20453 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

As a participant in this course, you will learn through reading, writing, discussing and reflecting. Together, we will examine the fundamental elements of fiction and poetry. We will explore a diverse body of published works. And, foundational to the workshop process, we will discuss the working drafts by our peers. Above all, we will privilege writing process and development. 

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

Participation in a 5-credit course is equivalent to 150 hours of work over the summer session. This will include 8 hours of classroom time weekly (lecture, discussions, workshop) and 20+ hours of outside preparation (reading, writing, investigating, reflecting, projects). You are also encouraged to visit me in office hours, attend literary events, and connect with your peers. 

Required learning materials include Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer and Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton, and course handouts. I am also asking that you find access to a portable electronic device that will allow you to listen to a podcast and move simultaneously (e.g. walk or dance).

CRN: 22647 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Heim, Stefania F.

In this course, we will explore together the activities that go into being a creative writer, among them: reading, listening, note-taking, collecting, thinking, questioning, drafting, erasing, and revising. Through in-class experiments and formal assignments we will read and write in familiar genres like poetry and fiction—identifying, working through, and honing a shared vocabulary of literary techniques—as well as in hybrid forms including lyric essays, prose poems, and epistolary texts. We will learn from interpretive and collaborative practices (including imitations and translations), visual techniques (graphics and the page as field), and performance modes. As a community of writers, we will learn how to be open-minded, sensitive, and critical readers of published work, of our classmates’ writing, and of our own experiments, especially as we explore the possibilities of substantive revision. Thoughtful and energetic participation, attentiveness and curiosity, a willingness to take risks, and careful reading will be the primary requirements throughout the quarter.

CRN: 22648 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Beasley, Bruce H.

This course is an introduction to creative writing essentials in all genres, including imagery, metaphor, dialogue, scene, point of view, rhythm and meter, lineation, and much more. We’ll practice writing in multiple genres (poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and various forms that resist or combine traditional genres). We’ll read poems, short stories, prose poems, fables, parables, creative nonfiction essays, and cover the rudiments of writing in each genre. Throughout the course I encourage exploration, wild creativity, exuberance, and experimentation, even as we practice formal and technical skills particular to individual genres. We will do a lot of in-class and take-home prompts and writing exercises to help you generate writing in response to extremely different kinds of poems, essays, and stories.

CRN: 23112 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

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: 23847 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20305 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

As a participant in this course, you will learn through reading, writing, discussing and reflecting. You will be tasked with developing fictional worlds, characters and predicaments. We will have conversations about the fundamental elements of fiction (e.g. tense, pov, dialogue), as we examine both a diverse body of published work and the early drafts (stories) written by your peers. 

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

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

Required learning materials include Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer and Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler. I am also asking that you find access to a portable electronic device that will allow you to listen to a podcast and move simultaneously (e.g. walk or dance).

CRN: 20454 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Magee, Kelly Elizabeth

This is a workshop course in the art of storytelling, with a focus on short fiction. As an introductory course, we’ll cover things like creating memorable characters, crafting vivid scenes, maximizing tension, channeling authentic voices, working with form, and searching for insight. More importantly, we’ll investigate how to tell the kind of story a total stranger might want to spend an hour or so of their hard-won life reading—the kind of story people will believe, no matter how far-fetched the premise. We will also practice the art of peer feedback, which involves reading deeply into a text from a writer’s perspective and offering interpretations, analysis, and suggestions.

The course will involve writing lots of experimental exercises, considering what audience(s) we’re hoping to reach through our words and worlds, and how to reach them. We’ll also study a range of published short fiction to see what kinds of structures, techniques, genres, and creative strategies other writers use to tell their stories. This class requires a lot of intensive reading and writing, and rewriting, and talking about writing…it’s a ten-week immersive experience in the craft of fiction. You’ll finish the quarter with lots of beginnings, middles, and endings, though not necessarily in that order.

ENG 353 Introduction to Poetry Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20077 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm 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 uses a mix of asynchronous and synchronous modalities. You’ll need to be able to independently organize your time to move through a sequence of activities and assignments each week and to attend synchronous Zoom meetings. The specific dates of our Zooms (for sure no more than once per week) will be announced on Canvas by the first day of classes; until then, please hold our scheduled time (MWF 1-2:20) in your calendar.

CRN: 21994 DAY/TIME: T 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Shipley, Ely

This course focuses on the practice of reading and writing poetry. While the primary concern is student writing, we work from the basis that in order to become better writers, we also must become better readers. We will explore a range of poetic traditions and contemporary developments and spend the quarter reading, writing, and discussing poetry through focusing on elements such as metaphor, image, rhythm, sound, line, and dramatic tension. You will be responsible for not only submitting original work, but also for offering thoughtful observations to each work discussed. We become better writers through reading, thinking and feeling intensely, learning from our own work, the work of others, and above all, by practicing.

ENG 354 Intro to Creative Nonfict Writ 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20324 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Colen, Elizabeth Jane

In this introductory course, students will analyze all aspects of creative nonfiction, including characterization, voice, point of view, setting, structure, conflict, theme, and image, as well as the sonic qualities of language; learn how these tools are combined to best effect in the service of building a creative work of nonfiction; 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 fully revised, well-crafted work.

CRN: 20532 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Roach Orduña, José

An introductory course in writing nonfiction prose, such as personal essay, memoir, autobiography, travel writing, and other forms.

ENG 364 Introduction to Film Studies 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 20455 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am. Film Screening: W 5:00-7:50pm. Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

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.   

ENG 365 Film Hist: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or ENG 202

CRN: 21377 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm. Film Screening: M 4:00-6:50pm. Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn Y.

Course Description: This course explores a range of post-millennial films (2010 and after), characterized by a response to technology’s ability to shape and redefine human subjectivity and identity.  Harkening back to early cinema’s fascination with form, these recent films are distinct, in terms of the ways they utilize film technique and industry conventions to create a highly mediated cinematic experience. Moving beyond conventional narrative construction, these films create an interface between the film text and our daily interactions with smart technology, mobile and GPS systems, and artificial intelligence.   The selected films, from varying levels of commercial cinema, utilize the filmic medium to create affective responses in a variety of contexts—with the goal of breaking down preconceived notions about how human subjectivity and identity are shifting in our current age of ubiquitous computing as well as how gender/sexuality studies and critical race theory have reframed the cultural imaginary of “the film subject.”  

Specifically, the movies experiment with film form and conventions to develop material metaphors that demonstrate a form of visual argumentation, mediated relationships between human and non-human actors, and the extension of the human sensorium into virtual strata. Moving beyond the optical sensation of film, many of these movies highlight the affective experience of watching film, including the haptic responses that come from an embodied perspective of a historically situated subject. We will look at reception spaces in an expanded sense—from physical spaces dependent upon projectors and screens to “virtual spaces” that come from fluid immersion in TV, laptop, or handheld devices. Highly attuned to the embodied experience of diverse viewers, these films privilege the body, senses, perceptive modalities, and tactile, affective, and sensory motor perceptions in deeply creative ways. Thus, the course focuses on new films in the context of affective and new materialist theories.

Content Warning: Some of the films in the course deal explicitly with physical violence, sexual assault, racism, abortion, and sexism. Feel free to talk with me ahead of registering if you want to know what to expect with each film and whether this course will work for you. I will post content notes in the module of each film as well.

Course Expectations and Evaluation: In this course, I will be teaching you how to perform media-specific analysis of film and digital video within the post-millennial context. We will be reading contemporary film theory, which attempts to situate our current cultural moment in the larger stream of cinema history; and you will be working with the films closely to provide readings of their content and form. I ask that you come to class having viewed the film critically and having read the assigned reading—and then to be willing to share your thoughts, questions, and comments. This is especially important for those parts of the film that may seem difficult, puzzling, or provocative. It is okay not to have answers. In fact, it is much more useful to explore a film’s complexity or indeterminacy from different and multivalent perspectives than it is to reduce it to a single narrative. I’m organizing the course like an intimate movie club that gathers regularly for film discussions, which I hope you enjoy! My goal is to create an informal discussion format where any questions and comments can be asked of the group. This only works, of course, if you’re willing to share your perceptions and your experience of viewing the films, openly--and if you practice active listening when others speak about their interpretations.

In terms of course assignments, you’ll have the opportunity to write three multi-modal blogs and lead a group discussion/presentation.

Film Screening

Our film screening is scheduled on Monday at 4:00. Though we have a three-hour slot reserved, most films will be around two hours or less. You are welcome to bring food to the screening and to invite friends!

Selected films from among the following:

Her, Spike Jonze (2013)
Locke, Stephen Knight (2013)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma (2019)
Get Out, Jordan Peele (2017)
Tim’s Vermeer, Raymond Teller (2013)
The Rider, Chloë Zhao (2017)
Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer (2013)
13th, Ava DuVernay (2016)
Ex Machina, Alex Garland (2015)
Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch (2013)
Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy (2014)
Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller (2015)

Required Texts

“The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks (PDF)
Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener
“Sex in Public,” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (PDF)
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Vivian Sobchack

ENG 371 Rhetorical Practices 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 and junior status. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Feb 23rd at 4:30pm.

CRN: 22650 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Qualley, Donna Jeanne

Dear Aristotle,

You have been telling us for centuries that rhetoric is the art of discovering, in any given case, “the available means of persuasion.” Well, yeah. Sure, okay. But did you know that rhetoric is way more expansive than you ever imagined?

Did you know that rhetoric is all around us? That cobalt, crows, trees, hearing aids, and speedbumps are rhetorical? Did you know that rhetoric is energy? That it exists in the world—even before speech, before writing, before any intention to affect, move, or persuade another entity? That rhetoric opens a path—not just to our thinking selves—but to our affective lives and our relationships to to the world around us?

Did you know that rhetoric is love—that it dwells within our capacity to be open, exposed, and vulnerable to the affectations of others? Did you know that misunderstanding is an indispensable (and unescapable) feature of all communication? That trolling rhetoric can show us how to manage our vulnerabilities? That arguments about trigger warnings can teach us about the rhetoric of hospitality?

Aristotle, did you know that in our world, your “means of persuasion” such as facts and evidence and good reasons don’t always work to compel people to listen, to think, to do, to feel or act differently. I know, I know. Hard to imagine such a world, isn’t it?

But here’s an idea to mess with your mind (in all the best ways)! Why don’t you join us in English 371 as we explore different rhetorical practices for listening and practicing otherwise? (I mean, you ever heard of YouTube?) Come experience the strange, beautiful, and complex ways that persuasion can emerge and function in our lives. Throughout the course you’ll have a chance to “try on” and “try out” these practices in class and through short, written and visual exploratory responses. And Aristotle, tell your friends too!

(All readings are available on Canvas).

ENG 385 Sustainability Literacy II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from: UEPP 116, SUST 116, ENG 203, ENG 302, or SALI 201; or instruction permission.

CRN: 21566 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Brown, Nicole

Increasingly, new insights arise from the interfaces between diverse disciplines– such as art, writing, science and technology – which through various discourses, paradigms, and cultures have been specialized and driven apart. By shifting focus from the parts to the whole and from nouns to verbs, this writing intensive course approaches information and story from many different cultural and disciplinary perspectives to find problems and to also discover leverage points for solving problems related to matters of sustainability.

Systems thinking can be applied to every context—from community and professional organizations, to human anatomy and ecologies, worldviews, and to the broad reach and praxis of rhetoric. The course offers an introduction to the specialized language, habits-of-mind, and methodology of Systems Thinking to understand the social and material world as interdependent elements that form a complex and unified whole. Community-based projects shift our focus from analytical thinking to contextual thinking and develop an ecological practice towards the relationship between discovery, writing, and change.

The course invites guest visits from social change leaders in our community. This broad spectrum of disciplinary viewpoints will offer unique perspectives on systems thinking as a practice and field of study and work. Together we will identify the properties and engage in the process of writing/building a viable, desirable, and sustainable future.

Course projects include weekly writing assignment incorporating visual and verbal elements, including experimenting with new media and/or multi modal compositions. For the major project you will be a part of a team that applies a systems thinking approach to writing about sustainability issues in an organization or other community context you care about. We will use these models to develop and propose leverage points for achieving solutions through written and oral proposals.

You should leave the course with excellent writing samples: mappings, systems and rhetorical analyses, research displays, and proposals, as well as a new vocabulary and methodology to facilitate systems-based analysis, communication, and change.

400-Level English Courses

ENG 401 Sr Writing Studies/Rhet Sem 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 313, ENG 314 or ENG 371, or instructor permission; senior status. GUR: WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Feb 23rd at 4:30pm.

CRN: 23656 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Qualley, Donna Jeanne

Electracy and Rhetorical Invention

While orality and literacy continue to influence the institutions that inform and affect our lives, we are in the process of entering a third epoch, electracy, wherein the foundations and formations of thought, practice, and identity are being increasingly influenced by the institution of entertainment and play. Quote by Sarah Arroyo.

Something is going on.
The transition from a literacy culture to an electronic & digital culture has been engendering change—but not just to our technologies. It is also affecting our institutions, communities, values, behaviors, and practices. It is altering the ways we invent, design, and communicate ideas and information. It is creating new notions of subjectivity, identity, and representation. Some people think that we are on the cusp of a transformation that could be as significant as the change from orality to literacy several thousand years ago. The name that some rhetoric scholars have given this next “something” is electracy, and it is still in the process of being invented. In this course, we’ll consider questions such as these:

What is this thing called “electracy”? How can we contribute to the invention of this new apparatus? How are we already contributing?
What new ways of becoming, creating, critiquing, and communicating are emerging in the “electrate” apparatus?
What happens when we move from asking what things mean, (“What do I make of this idea?”) to focusing on what things do (“What can I do or make with this idea”)?
What is the relationship between play, pleasure, and truth?
How are emotional responses circulated and re-purposed through digital networks?
What is the significance of the shift from education to edutainment?

All readings and on-line videos will be available on Canvas. In addition to different forms of social reading annotations and occasional discussion posts, you’ll have the opportunity to be playful and inventive through several visual, audio, print/design projects.

ENG 406 Topics: Critical/Cultural Theory 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 313 or ENG 314; two courses from: ENG 307-347, ENG 364 or ENG 371. GUR: WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 23657 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Deconstruction

Description
The word “deconstruction” has passed into everyday speech although it is often misconstrued. This is especially true in shoddy journalism, but also in talks on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere. Who coined the term “deconstruction” and why? In this course, we will explore the emergence of deconstruction as a central moment in the history of 20th century critical thought, including in the writings of German thinkers Fredrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger; post-May ‘68 French theorists Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Michel Foucault; Yale School theorists like Paul de Man and Avital Ronell, UC-Irvine and UC-Riverside critical theorists of the 80s/90s. We will also survey emblematic differences between structuralist language study and Noam Chomsky’s Neo-Cartesian and/or “minimalist” language theory; the political and social implications of deconstruction in relation to Neo-Cartesian linguistics; the relation of deconstruction to educational, feminist, marxian, and anarchist theory; Freudian psychoanalysis; law and cosmopolitan right; and animal rights. Students will perform in class writing and reading exercises. They will write two in class essay exams and one formal paper. Group work and regular attendance are mandatory. No cell phones or laptops during class.

Texts

Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other
Hélène Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa”
Avital Ronell, Stupidity
Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics
Michel Foucault & Noam Chomsky, The Foucault-Chomsky Debate

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 332, ENG 333, ENG 334, ENG 335, ENG 336, ENG 338, ENG 339, ENG 341, ENG 342, ENG 343, ENG 347, ENG 364, ENG 371. GUR: WP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20796 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Yeasting, Jeanne Ellen

Origins of Western Gothic

CONTENT: This discussion-oriented, writing intensive literature seminar, will explore the origins of Western Gothic literature, starting with the first wave in 18th century England and ending with the start of the second wave in the early 19th century. We'll investigate some of the Gothic's well-known tropes and uses of the fantastic, the monstrous, and sublime, as well as how it employs horror, terror, and humor. We'll interrogate its enduring popularity. And, to deepen our understanding, we will delve into our texts’ varied and complex relationships to historical contexts and cultural constructs of domesticity, science, religion, gender, and labor. Through lots of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, we’ll strive to gain a deeper appreciation of Gothic literature.

ASSIGNMENTS & EVALUATION: Requirements include collaborative group projects, an weekly reading response work, a final analytical paper, lots of reading, and lots of thinking.

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

Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother. Edited by Frederick S. Frank. Broadview Press. 2003. ISBN: 978-1551113043
Ann Radcliffe, The Italian. Edited by Nick Groom. Oxford University Press. 2017. ISBN: 978-0198704430
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Norton Critical edition, edited by Susan Fraiman. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN: ‎ 978-0393978506
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 version). 3rd Norton Critical Edition, edited by J. Paul Hunter. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN: 978-0393644029 (2nd Norton Critical Edition ok, too: ISBN: 978-0393927931)
Supplemental texts on Canvas

ENG 418 Sr Sem: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: Senior status; ENG 313 or ENG 314; and one course from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310 or ENG 311. GUR: WP3. Opens to Juniors at 4:30pm on Feb 27 at 4:30pm. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20404 DAY/TIME: MWF 04:00-05:20 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

Larp as Literature: Schools of Larp

Emerging in the 1970s, Larp is a form of media in which authorial power is distributed and diegeses are co-created. In this senior seminar, we will situate larp within literary studies, critical theory, and decolonial studies while also looking at game studies scholarship that explores different movements or “schools” of larp, schools that tend to define themselves based upon the way they structure the co-creation of a given narrative. We will look at Nordic freeform and Boston-style “secrets and powers” movements, and depending upon class interest, we may also explore other regional larp movements, styles and traditions. Tracing the history of the larp medium, we will look at the work of larp historian Lizzie Stark alongside Shakespeare scholar Gina Bloom to ask if the origins of larp truly should be traced to the 1970s, or if perhaps should go back much further. Focusing on the literary turn in larpmaking, we will look at the rise of the larpwright in the 2010s, and the codification of larpscripts, while focusing on an era that Martin Nielsen has dubbed “the chamberlarp revolution.” We’ll also discuss the rise of what have been called “blockbuster larps” and larp studios, as well as activist larps. Exploring calls to leverage larp as an anti-racist and decolonial tool, we will read the works of Jonaya Kemper, Aaron Trammell, and Zoë Antoinette Eddy alongside W.E.B. DuBious, while also looking at critical larp design that intersects with disability studies and gender studies. Based upon student interest, we may also explore related interactive literary media, including netprov, e-lit, TTPRGs, and ARGs. Also, we will spend a bit of time looking into ways educators have brought larp into their classrooms, briefly exploring the methods of “edu-larp” and Gamemaking in Education (GME). We may even dip into critical code studies (CCS) methods and the engagement of larp with cli-fi and ecological data, if there is interest and time. Consent is as important to larp as bookbinding is to texts, and in that light, we will explore academic works and cultural artifacts that engage with consent and community safety in the context of larp, including work by scholars and gamemakers Johanna Koljonen, Maury Brown, and Sarah Lynne Bowman.

As a senior seminar, students should expect substantial weekly reading, and also expect to facilitate discussions and run games 2-4 times throughout the quarter. There will also be visitors from scholarly larp and critical gamemaking communities who will join us for conversations with the class via zoom. The goal of this class is to provide the opportunity to develop a work of literary analysis or critical larpmaking (as we will learn, larpmaking can be its own form of interpretation), or to develop a lesson plan or unit that incorporates larp or larpmaking. Depending upon the option you choose, you’ll write a paper of up to 10-12 pages. In addition, together as a class we will create an event or event series involving literary larp gameplay and public scholarship that will provide a forum to practice sharing our analyses and critical design with each other and with thinkers and players beyond our class.

CRN: 20405 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Lee, Jean

Water in Black Literature

Water is a central trope in African American and Caribbean Literature and 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 seas, oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, hurricanes, and floods inform African American and Caribbean reclamations of ancestors and their counter histories, and function as witnesses to contemporary racial injustice. We will focus on ecocritical, postcolonial, and feminist readings of representations of the Middle Passage and Caribbean Sea as womb and grave, mangroves as theoretical sites of rhizomatic relations, the Gulf coast, Mississippi Delta, and Ohio River as conduits of destruction and renewal, and all the above as homes of African Atlantic water deities.

CRN: 20415 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Giffen, Allison A.

Disability and 19th-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 a variety of genres, including novels, short stories, and poetry. 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. In addition, together we will create a class conference on disability and nineteenth-century US literature in which you will present your findings to the class as you develop the skills to express your ideas orally with clarity and coherence.

ENG 423 Maj Auth: 5cr

CRN: 20248 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Wong, Jane

Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay

“Sometimes I lose track
of all the bees and their singing.

You thought I said stinging.

— AN

Maybe you’re right: let us stop explaining.
I know those ants too — soon
they’ll slurp caves into the handful of apples…

— RS”

from “Letters from Two Gardens”

In this major authors course, we will tend to the work of two significant contemporary writers who are deeply invested in delight, ecopoetics, wonder, justice, the archive, and the pea vines of literary community: Aimee and Ross Gay. We will deeply engage with their poetry, essays, collaborative writing, and even watch conversations with Aimee and Ross roller skating. From Nezhukumatathil, we will read World of Wonders, Oceanic, and Lucky Fish; from Gay, we will read Inciting Joy, The Book of Delights, Be Holding, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. We’ll trace their literary lineage, bask in their collaborative work Lace & Pyrite, and also welcome them into our classroom virtually. This course will include close reading, literary analysis, creative exercises, and multimodal experiments to dig into the tender layers of their literary influence at this very moment. During a time of vast uncertainty and grief, how do we – as Gay writes – “walk/through the garden’s dormant splendor?”

CRN: 20472 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony

Jeff VanderMeer

We will look at Jeff VanderMeer’s work as an author, editor, and instructor and how he has contributed to not only movements of speculative fiction but to conversations around ecological thought. VanderMeer not only challenges concepts of nature writing as well as the anthropocentric grounding of the novel as a form. In his Area X trilogy he works with a local place, the St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge in Florida, and makes it weird. His connection to St. Mark’s and the area around it continues in his donating of a portion of all of his book sales to support the Refuge as well as his continued efforts to “re-wild” his home, which he documents on social media as well as in articles if various publications.

Required Texts

Ambergris Trilogy (Cites of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch)
Area X Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance)
Borne
Strange Bird
Dead Astronauts
Wonderbook: The illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
None of this is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer by Benjamin J. Robertson

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. Major restrictions never lift.

CRN: 22651 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Celaya, Anthony Stephen

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

In this course, we will examine language in context. Therefore, students will be asked to write regularly practicing and applying what we learn in class within the context of writing. Additionally, students will be asked to critically engage with the language practices they experience and witness outside of class over the course of the quarter.

ENG 443 Teaching English Language 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. GUR: WP3. Major restrictions never lift.

CRN: 20690 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Celaya, Anthony Stephen

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

ENG 444 Teaching English Language Arts in Sec Sch II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 443. Major restrictions never lift.

CRN: 20085 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 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; lesson plans; discussion plan and performance; reading module

TEXTS: may include: Gallagher, Deeper Reading; supplemental readings

ENG 451 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Fiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20143 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Westhoff, Kami Dawn Marie

Welcome to English 451! This course is designed to encourage you to continue your exploration into 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, and taking part in the process of submitting your own work. Showcasing your knowledge and creativity, you will produce a chapbook or a reading of your work as your final project.

CRN: 20534 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Colen, Elizabeth Jane

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.

ENG 453 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Poetry 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20406 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Wong, Jane

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

—  Audre Lorde, from “Poetry is Not a Luxury’

English 453 offers you an opportunity to delve even deeper into your creative skills and spend dedicated time close reading the work of other poets – particularly your fellow poets in class. This course asks you to experiment with different craft moves through generative writing, delve deeper into the particularities of a poet’s work, reflect on rigorous revision and feedback, and articulate your own poetics. You will be writing poems, offering feedback for your peers, creating literary community, and crafting a collection of your own. Some questions we will wrestle with throughout the quarter include: where is the “heart” of the poem? What formal techniques do poets employ (or break) to achieve a particular experience and why? What is the relationship between form and content? What are the stakes of poetry today? When someone asks you the question “what do you write about?” (and they always will!), how will you respond? We will examine the craft of poetry (inherited and invented forms, lineation, rhythm, repetition, word play, image, metaphor, persona, hybrid forms, etc.) in the larger context of poetics: why poems exist, how they create and resist meaning, how they create different experiences for readers and why. In addition to writing our own poems, we will engage critical essays on poetics as helpful frameworks (i.e. poetics from poets such as Aimé Césaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ross Gay, Solmaz Sharif, Chen Chen, and more), focus on the work of rising/prominent contemporary poets, and craft a chapbook collection as a culmination of our creative risk-taking. English 453 seeks to consider poetry not as a dusty old book, but as something alive, current, and full of potential today. We will also have two guest poets visiting this quarter (to be announced – yay!).

ENG 454 Creative Wrtg Sem: Nonfiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20256 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Miller, Brenda

The Art of Voice in Creative Nonfiction

“The truth of writing is the discovery of one’s voice—a voice that is unimpeded by anger, the desire for praise, or the fear of self-disclosure. This is the voice that knows more than we do, that manifests itself only in the act of writing.”

—Lawrence Sutin

“If you're not doing stories about the news, or celebrities, or things people have ever heard of elsewhere, you have to give people a reason to keep listening.”

—Ira Glass

Much of the power of creative nonfiction lies in the strength and character of the writer's voice. Finding and developing that voice, however, is not as easy as it sounds. In this course, we will do intensive study of short-form creative nonfiction so that we can hear many diverse voices and emulate some of their techniques. We will write lots of individual pieces, but we’ll also aim toward creating an accumulation of short essays that add up to a larger story. We’ll also listen to oral storytellers to learn how to establish a strong voice and tell a compelling story in a short amount of time.

Texts: Brevity journal (online)

The Moth and Snap Judgement Podcasts
Handouts posted on Canvas

CRN: 21378 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, José

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

ENG 459 Editing and Publishing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20457 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Westhoff, Kami Dawn Marie

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

CRN: 23658 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Trueblood, Kathryn R.

Course Goals: Welcome to the publishing institute, a capstone course that offers practical information not only about the business of publishing books but also about literary careers that exist behind the scenes. The course will include a brief history of the book industry in the United States; corporate versus independent publishing; the roles of book reviewers and reps; agents, editors, and publicists. An overview of the literary arts scene in the Northwest will be included with a discussion of internship opportunities in the region. We will have guest speakers who are professionals in the field, so the syllabus will have to bend here and there to accommodate.

In this class, students will role-play the part of editor, publisher, and writer, learning the protocol and diplomacy of the industry. The course will offer an introduction to useful skills such as copyediting, proofreading, and promotional writing. We are essentially looking at publishing from both sides of the desk—as a person who might like to be employed in the publishing industry or start his/her/zir own publishing venture, and as a writer who would one day like to write and publicize a book; in all cases, you will want to know as much as possible about the trade.

The assignments for this course are designed to heighten students' awareness that publishing is key to the democratic process i.e., one of the ways ideas are disseminated in an open society. Historically, communities whose access to the public forum was limited have begun their own publishing movements; students will be encouraged to understand the roles of editor and publisher in that context.

As advanced workshop graduates, students are expected to be conversant with the principles and techniques of good writing and aim for the standards of professional copy. Work that has not been proofread and polished will not receive an A, regardless of content. This is a course in professional development, and a high level of fluency in writing is expected. 

ENG 460 MultiGenre: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 20684 DAY/TIME: T 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Shipley, Ely

Building on poet Robert Creeley’s statement, “form is never more than an extension of content,” we will explore the recent trend in contemporary poetry toward hybrid forms. While hybrid texts are nothing new, many contemporary poets are crossing genres to a degree that suggests an erasure of such categories altogether. This trend leads to questions such as: what are the subjects, circumstances, and desires that drive expansions of poetic form? What poetic techniques, whether meter and rhyme or appropriation and erasure, are used? What are their effects? Might we read such moves as fundamental to contemporary identity? Carole Maso asks, “Does form imply a value system? Is it a statement about perception?” The texts for this course span diverse embodiments of sexual, racial, national, class-based, and familial experience as they necessarily trouble traditional genres. Examining the artistic attributes of these texts, we will seek to understand how literature might be made. Through deep analysis of varied and excellent models, we will amass resources and practice techniques to produce creative work.

CRN: 20383 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Weed, Katie

What does it mean to write for the screen in 2023–when screens crowd our fields of vision in multiples, vying for our attention from our hands, our pockets, our desks, even our gas pumps–and when even bots can craft compelling plots?

This course will explore the craft, art, and pleasures of screenwriting today, pushing beyond traditional genre constraints and definitions. Our focus will be on generating fresh, boundary-pushing creations, blurring lines between forms and working extensively with the written word as well as audio and visual communication. Projects will include storyboards, treatments, loglines, pitches, and short scripts and videos of your own–as well as experimental and hybrid blends thereof.

The course will also cover the challenges of writing for new forms of AI-powered media, such as virtual and augmented reality. Throughout, we will experiment with these new tools, as well as develop critical perspectives on their use. We’ll play with ChatGPT, which with minimal prompting even composed elements of the generic-but-accurate course description above, and similar tools. We will also utilize physical resources across WWU’s campus such as the Digital Media Center and Student Technology Center. Texts will likely include Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World and Linda Seger’s Cut to the Chase.

ENG 462 Prof Wrtg 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 371; or equivalent experience and instructor approval. GUR: MP3. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday, Feb 23rd at 4:30pm.

CRN: 22770 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

Grant and Proposal Writing

At its essence, grant and proposal writing is the applied rhetoric of matching visions, missions, objectives, and goals to receive support and make things happen. This course introduces you to the rhetorical situation and principles of grant and proposal writing, in theory and practice--as a profession and a habit-of-mind.

Drawing on the broad usefulness of understanding the proposal writing process, this project-based, service learning course follows the creative process of shaping and evaluating ideas for change, identifying achievable funding opportunities, researching and assessing funding sources, strategies for rhetorical analysis and proposal writing, and preparation of a proposal package for submission.

ENG 464 Topics in Film Studies 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission.

CRN: 23127 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm. Film Screening: T 04:00-6:50pm. Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

In an oversaturated media environment characterized by an endless flow of audiovisual content and instant dissemination through a great range of online platforms, film criticism can arguably play a bigger role than ever before. In recent years, digitization of the press, immediate social media reactions, and easily quantifiable forms of assessment have dramatically changed the practice of film criticism.

This course offers both a historical/theoretical account of film criticism and an opportunity to practice criticism work in various formats. We will discuss social, cultural, and economic functions of film criticism through a series of applied case studies and writing assignments. From formative critical work in the 1950s (published in France, the UK, and the US) to the more recent trends of digital criticism and freelancing, we will trace the evolution of what being a film critic entails. We will focus on several types of film criticism (each written for a different target audience) including trade reviews, capsule reviews, analytical essays, festival coverage, and film journalism/reporting. Students will build a portfolio throughout the quarter by writing about many notable films and reflecting on their writing process.

Required book:

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

By A. O. Scott, New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2016.

All other readings will be made available on Canvas.

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, Feb. 28, at 9:00am.

CRN: 23659 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm. Film Screening: W 05:00-07:50pm. Instructor: Youmans, Greg

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

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

500-Level English Courses

ENG 500 Directed Independent Study 1 TO 5cr

ENG 502 Seminar in Writing of Fiction 5cr

Notes and Prerequisites: Opens to MAs after 9:30am on Tuesday Feb 28

CRN: 23128 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Guess, Carol A.

This workshop will focus on reading and writing short fiction. Assignments include two original short stories and a class presentation on a favorite recent piece. All readings are available online; there are no books for this class.

ENG 515 Studies in Literary/Crit Theory 5cr

CRN: 23667 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Postcolonial Theory

Description

In this course, we will explore postcolonial texts in the Native America, Middle Eastern, and African contexts, including contemporary writers of diverse backgrounds from Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Mali, Burkina Faso, Pakistan-India, and the U.S. In addition to critical theorists, we will read selected poets and novelists to ground the theoretical reading. Key topics will include the Abrahamic/Ibrahimic; the Islamicate; Zionism (“Jewish Nationalism”: [Ashkenazi, Sephardic/Mizrahi identity and experience]) , Pan-Arabism, Ba’athism, Nasserism (“Arab Nationalism”) and Pan-Islamism; European Settler Colonialism in Hijaz, Algeria, Morocco, and elsewhere; Race, Racism, Orientalism, and Imperialism; Islamic Theocracy and the Democratic; Jihad, Terrorism, and Nationalism; Psychoanalytic Theory in Judeo-Muslim Context; Deconstruction and Egypto-African concepts of the Word; Free Speech and State Terror; Jahiliyyah and Liberalism. We will also critically analyze Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the fatwa issued against Rushdie, and the controversies surrounding this novel. Students are not expected to have significant preparation in Abrahamic (“Islamicate” or Middle Eastern and African) culture. However, by the end of this course, they will be able to engage important issues in this setting. Students will write an article length research paper. They will also write a two-hour essay exam at the course’s conclusion.

Texts

Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine
Ella Shohat, “Zionism from The Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims”
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
Edward W. Said, Freud and The Non-European
Mahmud Darwish, selected poems
Yahuda Amichai, selected poems
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx & “Circumfession”
Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy
Hawad, In The Net & “Anarchy’s Delirious Trek”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (selections)
Ella Shohat, “Black Arab Jew: Postscript to The Wretched of the Earth”
Norbert Zongo, “The Mobutuization of Burkina Faso” & The Parachute Drop
Thomas Sankara, Thomas Sankara Speaks (selections)
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

ENG 520 Studies in Poetry 5cr

CRN: 23668 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Beasley, Bruce H.

“The dream thinks like a poet,” wrote dream theorist Bert O. States. If poems, as a parallel, think like dreams, what do those forms of thinking sound like—what are the forms in how their sayings move, and why?  How do poems and dreams proceed—with what interior logic--from one assertion or image to another, and how does that procession differ from less “bizarre” ways of speaking?  In this seminar we’ll dig into poems and into dreams to learn from dreams about how poems move and learn from poems about the imagistic, linguistic, and narrative assemblages of dreams. We will read widely in experimental poetry and in dream theory. This seminar is designed equally for M.F.A. and M.A. candidates as we will approach dreams in critical, creative, and critical/creative hybrid forms. We’ll keep dream journals and examine our own dreams alongside dreamlike poems and dream reports by Federico Fellini and others. Seminar participants will do presentations on aspects of poetics and dream theory, write poems that draw on the forms and ideas of their dreams, and complete a final project in poetry and/or critical exploration of intersections between dreams and poetry.

ENG 570 Topics in Lit & Cultural Crit 5cr

CRN: 23669 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Heim, Stefania F.

Documentary Poetics

Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem “The Book of the Dead” uses language from Congressional hearings, personal interviews, scientific facts, and lyrical passages to tell the story of the Gauley Bridge industrial disaster, in which almost 1,000 mostly Black workers in West Virginia died as a result of prolonged exposure to Silica dust. “Poetry can extend the document,” Rukeyser asserts, urging her readers to reconsider the work of poetry, its “proper” materials, and what it has to do with the broad terrain on which lives are negotiated, organized, remembered, made meaning from. Following Rukeyser into the field of Documentary Poetics, this course asks: How might the tools of poetry be used to engage topics outside of the narrowly construed realm of the “aesthetic”? What relationships does Documentary Poetry assume or animate between the individual and the communal? Between intimate life and public life? Between poetry and history? Between expression and witness? How shall we talk about a poem’s “voice” or voices? What sort of truth are we after, anyway? In this course we will take the poetic use of source materials not as instances of “mere” play (though some works we encounter will be playful), but as urgent interventions in interdisciplinary thought. We will read poems closely to investigate how their techniques and strategies enact knowledge, make things happen. Whether it is a form or a current, a practice or a tradition, we will attend to the histories of Documentary Poetry (in addition to Rukeyser we will likely read Charles Reznikoff, Robert Hayden, William Carlos Williams, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and we will revel in contemporary experiments with “extending the document” (by writers like M NourbeSe Philip, Don Mee Choi, Philip Metres). There will be opportunities for both creative and scholarly investigations into Documentary Poetics, including a significant research project.

ENG 575 Studies in Women's Literature 5cr

CRN: 23670 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

Early American Women's Auto/biographics

CONTENT: In this seminar we’ll read American women’s autobiographical texts from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century. We’ll look at stories of selfhood by Black, Native, and White women. We’ll pay close attention to how gender and racial identities are blurred in these texts and in the ways the texts were received. We’ll think about self-representation, subject formation, and other autobiographical practices. On our way, we’ll consider American Puritanism, domestic violence, gender, genre, race, and capitalism, among other issues.

While this isn’t a seminar in pedagogies, the texts and contexts of this seminar will provide solid preparation for those who might go on to teach an American literature survey. Past participants in this seminar have subsequently had their seminar papers published, have presented parts of their seminar papers at national academic conferences, and have successfully used their seminar papers as writing samples for applications to doctoral study and law school.

Note: As with almost all early American writing, the readings contain scenes/subjects that may be triggering for some readers.

ASSIGNMENTS: Regular reading, oral presentations, and a 15-20 page seminar paper.

EVALUATION: Evaluation based on seminar participation, oral presentations, and the seminar paper.

TEXTS:

K. Z. Derounian Stodola (ed.), Women's Indian Captivity Narratives
Abigail Abbot Bailey, Religion and Domestic Violence: The Memoir of Abigail Abbott Bailey
Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches
Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims
Ella Higginson, Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature

ENG 598 Sem Tch Eng: 5cr

CRN: 21713 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven L.

This iteration of English 598 is designed to prepare students to teach literature courses and to conduct research on teaching within the broader field of English. The course begins with an overview of theories of learning and an exploration of the nature, value and purposes of reading and teaching literature, with particular attention to the teaching of close reading and facilitating literature discussions. Next we examine approaches for conducting research on teaching English, and the journals, conferences and communities in which research on teaching English is shared. In the second half of the term students focus either on creating a detailed literature syllabus or on carrying out a research study. Successful students will leave the class with prepared syllabi, lesson plans and a teaching statement or research ready for submission to an academic publication or conference. While this section focuses on the teaching of literature, students are free in the second half of the course to conduct research on the teaching of composition, creative writing or film.

Course texts include Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and selections from

Rosenblatt: Literature as Exploration
Showalter: Teaching Literature
Parker: Literacy is Liberation: Working Toward Justice Through Culturally Relevant Teaching
Scholes: The Rise and Fall of English
Nussbaum: Poetic Justice

Spring 2023 Course Descriptions

Table of Contents

100-Level English Courses

200-Level English Courses

300-Level English Courses

400-Level English Courses

Graduate English Courses

100-Level English Courses

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 Writ in Hum: 5cr

CRN: 22276 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

CRN: 20128 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

CRN: 20245 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

CRN: 20682 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Steele, S. Hayley

CRN: 20688 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

CRN: 20689 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven L.

CRN: 21136 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony Alan

CRN: 21993 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

ENG 214 Shakespeare 5cr

CRN: 20390 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

ENG 234 African-American Literature 5cr

CRN: 23651 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Lee, Jean

ENG 236 Asian American Literatures 5cr

CRN: 21712 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Yu, Ning

ENG 238 Society through its Literature 5cr

CRN: 23845 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

ENG 282 Global Literatures 5cr

CRN: 23844 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg Stds: 5cr

CRN: 20075 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Cushman, Jeremy W.

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

CRN: 20140 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

CRN: 20326 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

CRN: 20393 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 20417 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 20447 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

CRN: 20535 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

CRN: 22639 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5cr

CRN: 22281 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

CRN: 21371 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

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

CRN: 21373 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

CRN: 23848 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

CRN: 20076 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony Alan

CRN: 23655 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Yu, Ning

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

CRN: 22643 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn Y.

ENG 317 Survey: Medieval 5cr

CRN: 22753 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5cr

CRN: 22646 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

ENG 319 Survey: The Long 18th Century 5cr

CRN: 21374 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

ENG 334 TextsAcrossNAm&Eur: 5cr

CRN: 21741 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm. Film Screening: W 5:00-7:50 pm. Instructor: Youmans, Greg

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

CRN: 23110 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

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

CRN: 20403 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

ENG 342 Studies in Literary Genres 5cr

CRN: 22282 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

CRN: 20381 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr

CRN: 20141 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

CRN: 20453 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

CRN: 22647 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Heim, Stefania F.

CRN: 22648 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Beasley, Bruce H.

CRN: 23112 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

CRN: 23847 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduña, Caitlin

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5cr

CRN: 20305 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

CRN: 20454 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Magee, Kelly Elizabeth