Winter 2024 Course Descriptions

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Learn more about major restrictions, prerequisites, and other frequently asked questions on the English Department Registration FAQ page.

100-Level English Courses

ENG 100 Intro to College Writing 5cr

CRN: 12617 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael

A writing course that offers practice in reading complex texts, writing with fluency and using the conventions of standard written English. Regularly scheduled conferences with instructor required. S/U grading.

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU 5cr

View CRNs and DAY/TIMEs on Browse Classes in Web4U.

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

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

OVERRIDES / CAPACITY OVERRIDES ARE NEVER GRANTED FOR ENGLISH 101.

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 WritinHumanit:PopMusic 5cr

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

CRN: 10655 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

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

Although we will be listening to lots of music together, our specific subject will be the analytic responses music has inspired, particularly with regard to contemporary pop (from the mid-20th century to the present). This will include such things as album reviews, lyrics, and liner notes of course, but also extend into music journalism, music documentaries, and weighty tomes of cultural criticism. My hope is that you will leave the class not only far more aware of the reach of writing in the humanities, but far more knowledgeable about the place of pop music in our culture and history (and perhaps having had your horizons extended a bit).

ASSIGNMENTS: Students will write about 20 pages of analytic writing total across three writing/presentation projects in addition to an ongoing listening journal. This writing will include a thorough response to the reading of one full-length book of music criticism or history. 

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101.

CRN: 10058 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

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: 10181 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Caitlin

CRN: 10488 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Weed, Katie

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

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

CRN: 10656 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven L.

English 202 is 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. The course introduces students to the challenge of situating themselves in relation to a literary text and to critical conversation about that text. Students learn to "see" a work of literature from multiple perspectives and to argue for what it may "say" or "show" us about a particular topic.

In our case, we will focus on the theme of "Love and Longing in Literature." This doesn't mean we'll be reading romances. Instead, we'll be examining the characters we read about from the perspective of what they love and long for. Writers in fact, 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 longing and love that motivate and drive characters, including love for people, ideas and pastimes.

Course texts include mature themes and language, including a discussion of suicide.

CRN: 10657 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: To Be Announced

CRN: 10658 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

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

ENG 203 Wrtg for Public&Prof Audiences 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 12625 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

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

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

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

ENG 216 American Literature 5cr

CRN: 13122 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

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

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

TEXTS:

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Beginnings to 1865
Selected Writings of Ella Higginson

ENG 235 Native/Indigenous Literatures 5cr

CRN: 13865 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

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

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg&Public: Hip Hop Culture 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior status; or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday Nov 16 at 4:30pm.

CRN: 10324 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Bridges, D'Angelo

In this course, students will examine the rhetorical possibilities and constraints of hip hop culture in the United States. Drawing from scholarship, editorials, OP-EDs, news, social media, and hip-hop music, this course will examine the important ways African Americans have used hip hop to write and speak persuasively about their material and social condition. The goal of this course is to expose students to the various rhetorical strategies of hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, The Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, Kenderick Lamar, Cardi B, and others have used their lyricism to critique American society.

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101; junior standing. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday Nov 16 at 4:30pm.

CRN: 10308 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

This interdisciplinary course puts knowledge into action by communicating technical and disciplinary knowledge in accessible ways to a range of audiences. The course engages with an exciting rhetorical praxis that includes: care, research, invention, translation, design, writing, testing, revising, and publishing.

In addition to rhetorical analysis and accessible design and writing strategies, the course considers the influence of globalization and localization on information and information technologies. Paying attention to the behaviors of readers/users in relationship to cultural, social, economic, and ecological contexts, we reflect upon how we view authorship and our disciplinary responsibility towards the social construction of knowledge. A primary goal for the course is to construct a portfolio of rhetorically savvy and accessibly designed documents for use with public audiences [most likely] outside the class: resumes, cover letters, memos, interpretive materials, instructional documents, usability testing reports, proposals, and other verbo-visual representations of information. Similar to most professional and technical writing contexts, these projects require you to work individually (as well as collaboratively) to conduct out of class observations and research and to practice/learn new knowledge concepts and computer applications. Throughout the quarter, you will participate in the ongoing process of writing and accessible design that includes: planning, researching, drafting, collaborating, testing, revising, and publishing.

CRN: 10352 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: 10395 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 10444 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

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

CRN: 10499 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: 11092 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restrictions lift for Creative Writing Majors on Monday Nov 20 by 10am. All major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 12088 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. If you have taken ENG307 or ENG317, do not take ENG 307.

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.

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restrictions lift for Creative Writing Majors on Monday Nov 20 by 10am. All major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11286 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

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

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

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

TEXT: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Beginnings to 1865

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restrictions lift for Creative Writing Majors on Monday Nov 20 by 10am. All major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11287 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Hardman, Pam

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

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

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

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restrictions lift for Creative Writing Majors on Monday Nov 20 by 10am. All major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11288 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Heim, Stefania F.

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

Modern Elegy

“We need elegies,” concludes poet Countee Cullen at the end of his 1925 poem “Threnody for a Brown Girl.” In this course, we will ask: what can literature possibly offer us in the experience of grieving our beloved dead? How might stanzas or musical language negotiate the intersection of private and public trauma, relating individuals to the world in moments of the most intense feeling? What kind of poetry can speak to structural violence and mass killings in racist, sexist, and xenophobic states? What relationships can we imagine between mourning, literature, and politics? Derived from the Greek for “mournful song,” the traditional “European elegy” is understood to move through three stages of loss: from lament, to praise, to consolation. Together, we will consider the legacies of this form, its developments across the 20th century, and any potential it might have for our present. We will study elegies that confront intimate loss as well the most devastating aspects of the past century: lynchings, the Holocaust, perpetual war and industrialized armed conflict, the police murders of Black people, the AIDS epidemic, and the COVID-19 pandemic. We will root our investigations in various theoretical approaches, close reading poems that, in Jahan Ramazani’s words, “erupt with all the violence and irresolution, all the guilt and ambivalence of modern mourning.” In this student-centered, writing-intensive seminar, interactive discussions and various creative and scaffolded writing assignments will provide multiple ways in to this challenging and moving material.

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10081 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

This course will examine a range of critical and cultural theories from the ancient world through the later nineteenth century, including rhetorical, interpretive, aesthetic, and critical approaches.

No textbook is required for this course; the instructors will provide all readings in PDF form.

Course requirements will include active engagement in class meetings and a combination of low-stakes writing assignments and formal essays.

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 12341 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

CONTENT: In this course we will explore contemporary critical and cultural theories in order to develop our own strategies for interpreting texts and culture. We will ask questions about what constitutes a “text,” a “sign,” and “ideology,” what distinctions (if any) exist between the canon and popular culture, how gender, race and class affect the production and analysis of texts, and how social identities are constructed. We’ll use the assigned readings as starting points for analyzing a variety of cultural products, such as literary texts, film, television, advertisements, the internet, and music. Most of the course will focus on theories articulated during the last half of the twentieth century, although we will place them in their historical contexts and discuss how they arose from previous ways of thinking. The goals of the course are to increase your abilities to critically interpret various texts and cultural phenomena, and to articulate these interpretations in your own writing, interweaving your own ideas with other theorists’ notions.

ASSIGNMENTS: Assigned reading; participation in class discussions; three question-response sets; one summary/analysis paper; one final mixed-media project.

TEXTS: Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux, The Theory Toolbox; weekly reading packets (provided in class)

CRN: 12342 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

This course will explore Marxian and Nietzschean threads informing contemporary theory and criticism. A detailed inspection of foundational works by Marx and Nietzsche will be followed by an introduction to critical theory (broadly construed), deconstruction and poststructuralism, and post-humanist or post-historical criticism. A number of shorter literary works will also be read and discussed in order to both elucidate and complicate the intersections of literature, art, politics, science, and philosophy.

Texts
Vincent Leitch, et al, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd Edition); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology –– The War Machine; Vilém Flusser, Post-History; Tiziana Teranova, After the Internet –– Digital Networks Between Capital and the Common.

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 12343 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. Do not take ENG 318 if you have taken ENG 308 or ENG 318.

EARLY MODERN WITCHES

Between 1450 and 1750, the rise of colonialism and capitalism coincided with the rise of witch hunts across Europe and the Americas. Christian authorities and other powerful men saw witches as people whose religious beliefs or practices contradicted dominant forms of Christianity, as people who interfered with procreation or refused to procreate, and as people who gathered outside of patriarchal spaces. We will look beyond those perspectives to explore the complex material, political, and cultural factors that shaped experiences of gender, race, religion, and power in the early modern world.

In this course, you will build foundational skills for the English major by deepening your close reading and critical thinking practice and by reading a survey of historical genres. Our reading list includes a dialogue, a romance, several trial records, some folk tales, and a scientific treatise that were all created before 1700 and that all feature discourses on witchcraft and representations of women, nonbinary people, and men as witches. We will also read a play, a satirical novel, and essays from the 20th and 21st centuries that critically reimagine and reframe the lives and complex identities of people accused of witchcraft before 1700. Our authors include anonymous storytellers, Leslie Feinberg, Charlie Josephine, Fernando de Rojas, Silvia Federici, Johannes Kepler, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Wynter, Mary Rowlandson, Lisa Brooks, Cotton Mather, and Maryse Condé.

Students will be responsible for using the social annotation tool hypothesis to discuss class readings with each other before coming to class, for writing two in-depth reader reports, and for composing two participation commentaries and two learning commentaries. The midterm and final exams in this class will be collaborative, meaning that students will work with the instructor to co-create and respond to short essay questions that showcase their cumulative knowledge. Attending more than 75 percent of class meetings is required to pass this course. You will need to purchase four books for this class, and the rest of our readings will be available as PDFs.

ENG 320 Survey: The Long 19th C 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11867 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Giffen, Allison A.

The seminars and surveys time periods are not repeatable. If you have taken ENG310 or ENG320 do not take ENG320.

The Long Nineteenth Century: U.S. Gothic Literature

Antiquated spaces, castles, patriarchal estates, ghost ships and garrets, these are some of the settings of the American gothic literature, a literature which harbors America’s hidden secrets, its repressed emotions, desires, and anxieties.  In this course we will examine the ways in which gothic literature represents the cultural contradictions between American optimism, with its investment in a coherent national identity, and some of America’s darker realities. Race and slavery are specters that insistently haunt U.S. gothic literature, and we will pay close attention to the relationship between fictive gothic effects and the very real horrors of New World slavery. We will also attend to the development of a female gothic in American literature, exploring the interesting tensions between the perpetuation and consolidation of oppressive social structures and the text’s drive toward subversion. My goal is to offer you a survey of U.S. nineteenth-century literature, focused through the lens of the gothic. Writers under consideration will include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, and Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Requirements will include lively and engaged participation in classroom discussion, a variety of formal and informal short writing assignments, and an essay-style midterm and final exam.

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 12633 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

The seminar and survey time periods are not repeatable. If you have taken ENG 321 do not take ENG 311 or ENG 321.

Three Modern Writers: Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy

In Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Gertrude Stein remarks that,

It is awfully hard for any one to go on doing anything because everybody is troubled by everything. Having
done anything you naturally want to do it again and if you do it again then you know you are doing it again
and it is not interesting.

In this section of English 311, we will examine the work of three modernist writers –– Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy –– not primarily in terms of their standing as feminist writers, but as writers who, from their relatively marginalized positions, developed original and revolutionary modes of thought that continue to impact our thinking. In Everybody’s Autobiography, for example, Stein’s remarks on the importance of seriality can be regarded as untimely in the sense that they resonate with contemporary art and writing in a manner that not only helps to expose how a good deal of contemporary art works, what it does, what effect it might have, but also insofar as it provides us with a means of looking back at earlier works of art and literature in a productive manner. In “What are Master-pieces and Why There Are So Few of Them” (1936), she is already working to undermine the Western privileging of speech (“talking has nothing to do with creation, talking is really human nature as it is and human nature has nothing to do with master-pieces”), as well as to destabilize the traditional conception of the author and authorial “expression.” She does this, moreover, with a great deal of humor. Woof and Stein are both engaged in the examination of temporality, and their work illuminates early twentieth century controversies regarding the nature of time and resonates with late twentieth and twenty-first century ideas about the relationship of time and subjectivity, on one hand, and notions of the Event on the other. The problem of contingency (potentiality, the virtual) figures prominently in the work of all three.
Mina Loy is perhaps the most overtly political of the three writers; her work demonstrates resistance to complacency
and a rejection, as Peter Nichols remarked, of “any coherent model of the self as something both imaginary and
conventional.”
TEXTS
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Gertrude Stein: Gertrude Stein/Selections, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Mina Loy: Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeke

ENG 333 Glbl Lit: Scribes & Griots 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202, Reserved for Senegal Study Abroad Program

CRN: 13959 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

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

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

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

ENG 335 TxtsOutAm&Eur: Senegal 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent. Reserved for Senegal Study Abroad Program.

CRN: 13960 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

Literary and Creative Expressions Across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

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

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

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

ENG 336 Scriptural Lit: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101.

CRN: 13866 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

In this course, we'll examine the Jewish and Christian scriptures not as sacred texts but as literature. The Judeo-Christian Bible is a complex anthology, consisting of many different genres and literary modes. This text has, of course, had a profound effect on the course of world history. It is also absolutely fascinating to read, offering a remarkable range of characters and events.

This course will emphasize the Bible's narrative texts. (We have to limit our attention somehow--it's a huge book, impossible to treat thoroughly in ten weeks.) We will, however, consider a range of strategies for reading these stories. We'll spend most of our time on the Hebrew Scriptures, or Tanakh (which Christians refer to as the Old Testament), but will also attend to the Gospels and to apocalyptic writings such as the Book of Revelation. We will consider these narratives with an eye to their context and to the editorial practices that brought them together. We'll also consider the ways that their meanings continue to evolve and to respond to the contemporary world.

On successfully completing this course, you should have a much better understanding of the literary forms and styles found in these scriptural writings, and you should be able to read and understand them from a range of perspectives.

The course does not assume any prior knowledge of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. It also, of course, welcomes students from any religious or spiritual background, including those with no experience or knowledge of any religious tradition. All students, whatever their background, will find this a welcoming course.

Course requirements will include a variety of writing assignments and regular engagement in the classroom.

ENG 337 Trvl Writing in the Sahel 2cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent. Reserved for the Senegal Study Abroad Program.

CRN: 13961 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

This course will discuss travel writing in the Sahel with special emphasis on the "Timbuktu Narrative." Each student will read one assigned text written by travels in West Africa. Authors studied may include Mungo Par Felix Dubois, Jean Rouch, Paul Stoller, and others.

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

ENG 339 Mythology and Literature 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202

CRN: 13126 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Vulic, Kathryn Rajam

Transformations and Transitions

Mythological stories and literature often strive to explain the origins of things: how they began, but also how they changed to become the thing we know now. They also often strive to explain certain aspects of the human condition, including how people themselves can change over time. This quarter we will focus on mythological literature – a handful of foundational literary texts from a variety of cultures – that is interested in narrating changes, whether of personal opinions, bodies themselves, land formations, cultures, and more.

Tentative reading list – please do not purchase until specific class editions are posted (all are in translation, but I have included the original language in parentheses):

Gilgamesh (Akkadian)
Metamorphoses (Greek)
Prose Edda (Norse)
One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic)
Ramayana (Sanskrit)

Tentative assignments:

Reading responses. 7 times during the quarter you will help build the day’s lesson plan by submitting comments and questions in advance about the day’s reading. Class discussion will use these comments and questions as organizing principles.
Writing responses. I will ask you to keep a reading journal in which you keep your reading notes, thoughts, and reflections about each text. I may occasionally give you a prompt that I will ask you to address in your journal. I will collect these journals twice a quarter for review.
Extended reading. You will choose a mythological text that you will read on your own. This text should be something that could reasonably have been added to the syllabus if we had more weeks in the term. You will write up an introduction to the text and a rationale for your choice.
Final group project. I will ask you to create your own modern remix of one of the texts we have read this quarter. This is a multimedia assignment that should demonstrate your group’s analysis and exploration of one specific aspect of a class text. Each group will present their work in class.

ENG 345 Film&Media Ac. AsiaAfricaMELA 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 13868 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

Film Viewing DAY/TIME: M 04:00-06:50 pm

Adaptations in Global Cinema

Even though adaptations can occur between many different types of media forms, the study of films adapted from existing sources tends to have a narrow focus on works based on literature, and novels in particular. This emphasis on novel-film pairings has caused a number of significant issues in adaptation theory including the literary source’s perceived superiority over its filmic adaptations, the problematic use of fidelity as an evaluation criterion, and a trade-off between effectively translating the narrative or capturing the “essence” of a text. This course aims to offer alternative perspectives on these ideas and explores the practice of adapting literary texts into feature films in the context of global cinema. In this course, we will

Review key theoretical approaches to adaptation
Critically study relevant concepts such as fidelity, intertextuality, medium specificity, and multimodality
Closely read a diverse selection of texts from Asia, Australia, and Latin America
Expand the framework of adaptation beyond novel-film pairings by analyzing films based on works in alternative literary formats (novella, manga etc.)

Books and Films

A Silent Voice (Manga, 2013) written by Yoshitoki Oima, film (2016) directed by Naoko Yamada
My Brilliant Career (Novel, 1901) written by Miles Franklin, film (1979) directed by Gillian Armstrong
The Secret in Their Eyes (Novel, 2005) written by Eduardo Sacheri, film (2009) directed by Juan José Campanella
Devdas (Novella, 1917) by written by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, film (2002) directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10659 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

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 Eddie Chuculate, This Indian Kid; Isabel Quintero, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces; Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep; Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Skim; Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, Punching the Air.

ASSIGNMENTS: Reading responses; in-class workshops; culminating mixed-media project

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10125 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Gulyas, Lee R.

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

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

COURSE GOALS

You will practice reading published work as a writer.

You will work with craft elements and literary techniques in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and read examples from a variety of authors, perspectives, genres, and forms.

You will experiment and take risks to create drafts, then cut, hone, and explore possibilities through revision.

You will actively work to increase your knowledge and skills, aim for professional standards, participate effectively in our writing community through discussion, develop useful feedback, work with revision and deadlines, and locate resources and opportunities both in and out of our classroom.

REQUIRED MATERIALS

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

CRN: 10365 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

In this section of Introduction to Creative Writing we will examine and practice the fundamentals of craft:  imagery and figurative language; sound; character and setting; voice and perspective; form and structure. We will focus on “close reading” of model poetry and prose; brainstorm creative expression and response; draft poems, stories, and creative nonfiction personal essays; share some of these projects with peers; and revise selected works--learning how to communicate about and make practical use of feedback on drafts. Evaluation will be based on completion of a sequence of activities and full participation in the class.

Required Textbook

Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide & Anthology

CRN: 11414 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Pagh, Nancy

Required Textbook

Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide & Anthology

CRN: 12345 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Weed, Katie

“When I'm writing, I'm thinking about time, pace, rhythm, cadence. Sometimes the language is upright, more formal in sound--my getting out of the story's way. Other times, the words lay down, lean, fall on each other, play differently, which makes a different sound and music. That's the part of craft that I love most. Thinking about how to stack the language.” -- Sarah M. Broom

“Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.” -- Patti Smith

“My mantra was: follow the fun. If I’m not having fun, I’m doing it wrong.” -- Jordan Peele

In this introduction to the practices and possibilities of creative writing, we’ll explore multiple genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting. Together, we will immerse ourselves in a variety of works across these genres, considering writing from authors and artists spanning continents and centuries. We’ll pay careful attention to various perspectives on theory and approaches to craft, reflecting on both tradition and innovation.

We’ll stack language. We’ll follow fun. We’ll think about power. As Matthew Salesses--whose book Craft in the Real World we will work with, writes: “Make no mistake--writing is power. What this fact should prompt us to ask is: What kind of power is it, where does it come from, and what does it mean?” Salesses again: “Craft is support for a certain worldview…To be a writer is to wield and be wielded by culture. There is no story separate from that. To better understand one’s culture and audience is to better understand how to write.” We will reckon with these ideas, with genre, with voice, with audience. We will wield, and be wielded by, cultures around us and the culture we create together in our classroom.

We’ll draft extensively both in and out of class, creating a range of work to share, and offering and receiving substantial peer feedback. We’ll compose pieces inspired by and in response to those we read, and as well generate original work of your own design, culminating in a polished portfolio and live reading.

CRN: 12346 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori Anne

The Observatory

‘The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.’ –Leonora Carrington
This Introduction to Creative Writing course will be an observatory in which we attempt to understand what it means to be readers and writers in this strange moment in time. You will learn to peer through the microscope to look at the nitty gritty of how pieces in different genres are crafted. And peer through the telescope to look out at the wider skies of yourselves and the world around you in relation to writing. Have we changed as readers and writers during the last three plus pandemic years? Can we imagine a different way of reading and writing the current world? Across the span of the quarter, you will study specimens of craft while witnessing and conversing with your classmates about your findings. You will consider what it means to read actively as writers, with intention toward discovery and curiosity and acceptable bewilderment—to admire the paintbrush hairs left in the painting, the traces of process. You will learn to read as thieves—to borrow and try out and try on different styles and elements. And lastly, to read with an eye toward the playful and what might be enjoyable precisely because it doesn’t make “sense.” You will, of course, also write and write and write—cataloging all this beauty and difficulty and constraint through notebooks + poems + essays + stories + hybrid forms.

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10003 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Magee, Kelly Elizabeth

English 351 is a ten-week immersive experience in all things fiction. It’s a workshop in the art of the short story, and as an introductory course, the class will cover things like creating memorable characters, crafting vivid scenes, maximizing tension, channeling authentic voices, working with form, and searching for insight. More importantly, the class will investigate how to tell the kind of story a total stranger might want to spend time out of their hard-won life reading—the kind of story people will believe, no matter how far-fetched the premise.

From students, the course will require intensive reading and writing, and rewriting, and rewriting, and talking about writing, and telling stories about writing, and learning to observe and focus and think with words. Student will write lots of experimental exercises, considering what audience(s) they hoping to reach through their words and worlds, and how to reach them. In addition to writing, students will practice the art of peer feedback, which involves reading deeply into a text from a writer’s perspective and offering thoughts about it. Each student will finish the quarter with lots of beginnings, middles, and endings, though not necessarily in that order.

The bulk of each class—and the grades—will be driven by:

large- and small-group discussions of published and student-produced texts
short craft talks and discussion
in-class prompted writing and creative exercises
group workshops of student writing

CRN: 10458 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Trueblood, Kathryn R.

This class will be about creation and craft, about opening the floodgates of the subconscious as well as learning the tough task of self-editing. We will pay close attention to the toolbox at the writer's disposal, identifying narrative strategies, levels of diction, conventional and unconventional short story form. The course will include many exercises in automatic writing in order to illustrate cliché-breaking and block-dissolving methods. These in-class exercises will also serve as a reminder that a workshop at its best provides a safe forum in which all are entitled to experiment and receive thoughtful responses to their work.  

This course will build a set of skills sequentially and introduce students to the protocol of good workshop critique. We will also consider the vital role that writers play as observers of their times. 

The course moves from exercises to scenes and then to full stories.  Scenes are the dramatic building blocks of stories and novels (as opposed to summaries, chronologies, or treatments for novels). By writing them, you should feel what it’s like to inhabit your characters. 

Texts: 

The Art of the Short Story, edited by Dana Gioia 
The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide by Michael Kardos, any edition

ENG 353 Introduction to Poetry Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10082 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

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

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

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 connect with your peers. 

I attempt to keep course costs as low as possible, but I require access to a few critical materials: 

No Farther Than the End of the Street by Benjamin Niespodziany
An electronic device (e.g. smart phone) that will allow you to access podcasts

ENG 354 Intro to Creative Nonfict Writ 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10349 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Dorr, Noam

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

CRN: 11415 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Roach Orduna, Jose

“We’ve all got stories to tell”

True stories, well told. That’s how Lee Gutkind, essayist and “the Godfather” (as Vanity Fair put it in 1997) of the creative nonfiction movement, characterizes the genre. Aldous Huxley, perhaps our most famous literary ‘psychonaut’ thought about it as the movement between a three-poled frame of reference: the personal/autobiographical, the concrete/particular, and the abstract/universal. And as Brooklyn bard Jay-Z puts it, we’ve all got stories to tell. In this course we’ll be learning about creative nonfiction by reading and writing it. We’ll read about first loves, hippies in San Francisco, father’s funerals, a mass shooting, the humble pecan, a man who lives on an abandoned film set, and the mathematics of subjugation. We’ll read personal essay, immersion journalism, polemic, contemplative essay, and lyric essay. We’ll also learn through short lectures, a number of short writing assignments, and one major writing assignment that will be read by everyone in class and “workshopped.”

ENG 364 Introduction to Film Studies 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101

CRN: 10309 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Cosey, Felicia

Flat Fee $6.25 Film Viewing DAY/TIME: M 04:00-06:50 pm

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

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

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

ENG 365 Film Hist: Contemporary World Cinema 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or ENG 202

CRN: 11290 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Odabasi, Eren HU 102 Flat Fee $6.25 35 0 35 PQ FTF Film Viewing DAY/TIME: T 04:00-06:50 pm

CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA

This course explores several evolving and flexible notions including national cinemas, transnational media production, digital filmmaking, blockbuster culture, film festivals, spectatorship and fandom in the context of contemporary world cinema.

While it carries the debatable term “world cinema” in its title, this course does not solely focus on “foreign” or “international” cinemas. We will study directors from new centers of exciting cinematic activity (such as Southeast Asia and Latin America), English-speaking territories (UK, Australia) and continental Europe alike. Throughout our discussions, we will see many different channels through which these regional borders are challenged; including but not limited to financial or institutional mechanisms, production practices, and cinematic kinship among directors from various backgrounds.

Within the scope of this course, the word “contemporary” functions as a tool to keep our endeavor focused and manageable rather than referring to a particular time period. One of the main objectives of this course is to provide students a balanced mix of established and emerging directors, highlighting the connections between their works and building bridges across generations.

Books

The text book for this course is available in e-book format from Western Libraries. Please use your WWU credentials to access the book:

World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives

Edited by Natasa Duravicova and Kathleen Newman, Routledge, 2010

ENG 371 Rhetorical Practices 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 and junior status. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday Nov 16 at 4:30pm.

CRN: 12661 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Cushman, Jeremy W.

Here’s the thing: persuasion happens. It has to! In other words, there is no such thing as "not being persuaded.” I mean, just to lay out a few examples, without having to think about it, we are all already persuaded that it’s a bad idea to shop for yams at BestBuy, and institutions like our own university persuade us to identify as a sophomore or as a senior. But the university doesn’t have to argue that we’re either a sophomore or a senior; we just accept the idea that we are. What’s more, persuasion even happens in our bodies: We know (or at least we’re persuaded) that we care or that we feel passionately because our heart rate quickens and our face gets flush when we speak out or speak up. All to say, we are always involved in some act of persuasion, big or small, because persuasion is baked into our living in a world with others. Or, put differently, rhetorical practices underlie the way we understand ourselves, our communities, and our shared values.

So I hope to explore the complicated nature of persuasion and rhetorical practices with you this quarter. Together we'll stir up several historical and newer approaches to rhetoric so that you can think better through personal and meaningful issues, and so that you can invent and create projects of which you’re proud. Specifically, we'll spend our time together:

asking questions about more ancient understandings of rhetoric, which, btw, are often wild and still wonderfully useful
using contemporary rhetorical practices connected what gets called Indigenous Wisdom/Methodology and to the Sociology of Science (which sometimes seems to purposefully ignore Indigenous Wisdom/Methodology)
wondering about the ways rhetoric turned into a 'bad word’ and why it sometimes might actually be a bad word.
deeply focusing on rhetoric's role in imagination and advocacy

Such a wide engagement with rhetoric and its practices, I hope, will help you better approach the ways persuasion and advocacy emerge as productive possibilities for the worlds in which you want to act. I also hope the class pushes you to invent powerful and personal responses to that rather tired question about what a degree, or even a single class, in the Humanities is good for.

400-Level English Courses

ENG 401 Wrt/Rhet Seminar 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 313, ENG 314 or ENG 371, or instructor permission. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday Nov 16 at 4:30pm.

CRN: 13869 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Lucchesi, Andrew John

Flat Fee $8.14

Disability Rhetoric

We will spend this quarter exploring the interdisciplinary field of disability studies with a special focus on rhetoric and composition. Disability Studies is premised on a few core concepts, among them the idea that “disability” is not merely a medical category to describe specific bodies; rather, “disability” describes a range of social experiences and identities and a wide network of cultural beliefs about what bodies are and how they should move in the world. These imperatives lead disability studies scholars in the humanities into various projects, such as recounting histories of the disability rights movement, analyzing portrayals of disability in literary or popular texts, and theorizing the underpinnings of ableism within cultural discourse. We follow Jay T. Dolmage's assertion that disability rhetoric is "the circulation of power through communication," and investigating it guides us to questions of culture, identity, and justice.

Our class will explore this and similar territory through a focus on rhetoric. From one perspective, we will learn about classical traditions of rhetoric and the ways they ignore or accept disabled bodies. With a focus on rhetorical theory and pursue concrete rhetorical situations, real-world contexts, such as college admissions essays, accessible parking placards, and activist sit-ins.

ENG 402 Writing & Community Engagement 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 302. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday Nov 16 at 4:30pm.

CRN: 10542 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

In this community engagement course you’ll team up with other students to help solve problems and build documents for specific partners in our community. Essentially, you’ll be building documents that go to work in the world. So a large part of this course will consist of practicing how to best discern and respond to the needs of specific community partners through writing.

The work we do will help you expand your competency for writing in context, communication strategy, project management, document design, teamwork, research, and using and adapting technologies with strong attention to accessible design. By closely considering the importance of the contexts out of which your quarter-long projects arise, you’ll discover some new things not only about the power (and often serious consequences) of writing and designing, but also about yourself.

Success in college and certainly in the world outside the classroom involves more than simply knowing how to read and write. Learning to write and design (or compose) alongside community partners (and moving and morphing environments) benefits your development as a writer, regardless of the life you are envisioning and working towards. Simply put, good writing, in whatever form it takes, can make things happen. And that’s what we’re going to do together, make things happen.

ENG 403 Film and Media Theory 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission.

CRN: 13870 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Youmans, Greg

Flat Fee $6.25 Film Viewing DAY/TIME: T 04:00-06:50 pm

This seminar is designed to introduce the foundational texts and ideas of film and media theory as an introduction to more advanced work in the field. We will explore together how scholars have thought about medium specificity (for instance, the differences between celluloid and digital media); spectatorship; the psychic dimensions of film viewing; representations of race, gender, and sexuality; various film and TV genres; global cinema; fan cultures; animation; the internet and social media; video games; and digital convergence. During a weekly screening session, we will watch films and other media texts that illustrate or elucidate the theories. In addition to short written engagements with the readings, students will work toward a final paper that applies one or more of the theories to a film, TV show, video game, or other media text of their choosing.

ENG 408 Cultrl Stds: 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 313 or ENG 314; two courses from: ENG 307-347, ENG 364 or ENG 371. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11863 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn Y.

Contemporary Indie Comix and Intermedial Theory

This course will introduce you to the radical creativity of the Indie comix scene that largely originated in Seattle. Focusing on handmade comics and contemporary Indie presses, we will explore the intersectional themes of identity, community, and agency. Through our diverse range of texts, we will try to articulate and understand the strange, the beautiful, the complex, and the interesting . . . in these graphic narratives. The selected texts feature marginalized and under-represented characters and themes, including topics such as love and friendship (relationship building), depression, sexuality, resiliency, and loneliness/isolation. We will celebrate comix as a potentially queer space where openness, fluidity, and non-conformity represent textual strategies as well as characters’ identities. The themes in these writers’ works intersect and overlap with politics and rebellion while highlighting the complex ways in which individuals are situated in larger generational, regional, and national contexts. We will also study comix form and technique as well as intermedial theory. You will have the opportunity to write about comix and create your own small comix in the course. No artistic experience or illustrating talent is required for the Studio Comix assignments. Students receive full credit for playing with the prompts! Additionally, contemporary critical media such as multimodal blogs and/or podcasts will be used to engage in critical analysis rather than the traditional essay. I also invite you to share your favorite comix or web comix on the Canvas Graffiti Board throughout the quarter.

*Please note: this class content contains adult language and themes.

Assignments and Evaluation

You will have the opportunity to read fabulous graphic novels and learn about intermedial theory in this course. Reading comics also requires a knowledge of the artform and an introduction to technical aspects of graphic art, which is super fun and interesting. You will have the opportunity to write 3 multi-modal blogs during the quarter as well as practice your own comic-making with Studio Comix exercises that come with full credit for completing the assignment! No artistic experience or illustrating talent is required. This seminar is geared for both literature and creative writing students as well as students in other majors who are interested in comix.

Required Texts

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud (PDF available)
Comix Theory and Criticism (Selected PDFs available)
Comix Samples, Eroyn Franklin (online)
Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers
Megahex, Simon Hanselmann
My Favorite Thing is Monsters (vol. 1), Emil Ferris
Sabrina, Nick Drnaso
The Pervert, Michelle Perez & Remy Boydell
Panther, Brecht Evens

ENG 408 Cultrl Stds: Scribes & Griots 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 313 or ENG 314; two courses from: ENG 307-347, ENG 364 or ENG 371. Reserved for Senegal Study Abroad Program.

CRN: 13962 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

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

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

ENG 410 Lit Hist: The Age of TV 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202; plus three from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 313, ENG 314, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320, ENG 321, ENG 331, ENG 333, ENG 334, ENG 335, ENG 336, ENG 338, ENG 339, ENG 341, ENG 342, ENG 343, ENG 347, ENG 364, ENG 371. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11603 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Prichard, Tony Alan

The Age of TV

This course examines the impacts upon the language of fiction by television. Specifically our work will counter standard short-sided viewpoints of cultural pundits about the negative effects of television—viewpoints which have unfortunately formed much of the dominant discourse about TV. Instead the course will examine how previous literary movements of the twentieth century, such as Dada and Surrealism became naturalized when writers attempted to realistically write about TV.

Required texts:

Ballard, J.G. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
Bunch, David, Moderan
Compton, D.G. The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe.
Derrida and Steiger, Echographies of Television
Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats.
Zielinski, Siegfried, Audiovisions: Cinema and television as entra’actes in history

ENG 418 Senior Seminar: Medieval Romance 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. Important note: ENG 418 is not repeatable & cannot be used as an elective in the literature major. Opens to Literature Majors of junior status on Monday Nov 20 at 10am. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10397 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Vulic, Kathryn Rajam

Medieval Romance

This class will explore the genre of medieval romance, focusing on the early literature that popularized the legends of King Arthur and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Morgan le Fay, Lancelot, and other famous romance figures; we will be examining the ways in which these romances shed light on the social and moral preoccupations of the era and also how these texts develop an art and rhetoric of courtly courtesy and love. While the modern assumption is that these texts are about knights in shining armor and damsels in distress, you will discover that the medieval narratives themselves are usually the other way around, with the knights almost always in trouble, and the women around them holding much or all of the power.

The term “romance” tends to be associated today with love and relationships, but in the Middle Ages, the term first described texts according to their language. Romances, or “romans,” as they were first known, were the texts that were written in a regional dialect of Vulgar Latin, the language that Roman soldiers had spread throughout the Roman Empire (and from “Roman” comes “Romance”). By the Middle Ages, the term “roman” had come to refer to a specific genre: that of the adventures, social concerns, and moral values of the nobility. We will discuss not only the development and variety of the romance genre, but also the historical contexts (feudalism, the Crusades, chivalry, and so forth) that framed many of the debates with which the romances engage.

Assignments and evaluation

A small research project that focuses on one of the major terms, events, people, or institutions of the Middle Ages – 10%
A project exploring a post-medieval interpretation of a medieval romance – 10%
A daily reading journal – 30%
A formal research paper of 10 pages plus bibliography, investigating an interpretive issue with support from critical, historical, or linguistic research (this project will be divided into several stages, including an annotated bibliography, outline, and drafts, and the overall grade will be comprised of the grades of the various parts) – 50%

Tentative reading list (check with instructor before purchasing books; for some of these, we will just be reading excerpts that will be made available on Canvas)

Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, Columbia University 1990.
Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, Everyman editions rev. ed. 1993.
Four Romances of England, TEAMS 1999.
Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, Penguin Classics 1960.
Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, The Romance of the Rose, Oxford World’s
Classics 2009.
Marie de France, Lais, Baker Academic 1995.
Robert de Boron, Merlin and the Grail, D. S. Brewer, 2005.
Thomas Malory, Works, Oxford University Press 1977.

ENG 418 Senior Seminar: Literatures of Abolition 5cr

CRN: 10398 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Warburton, Theresa Anne

Literatures of Abolition

Since the police murder of Minneapolis community member George Floyd in May of 2020, conversations about the abolition of prisons and police reached a fever pitch in the United States. However, this conversation did not come from the ether—rather, it drew on decades of careful, thoughtful, and powerful organizing against what some scholars have termed the “prison industrial complex.” In this course, we will dig deeper into the role that literature has played in this conversation.

Often thought to be the realm of sociologists, criminologists, and philosophers, writers and artists have long played a central role in the discussion about why abolishing prisons and policing is an essential part of a progressive move towards a more just society. In this course, we will engage this legacy in two ways: first, in the first half of the quarter, we will read literary texts that are related to the project of abolition, including both fiction and nonfiction. Then, in the second half of the quarter, we will focus on reading texts from folks who are currently or formerly incarcerated.

Students can expect to have a high reading load commensurate with an upper-level literature course. This will be coupled with writing assignments that aim to help students practice analyzing literary texts within the context of on-going political conversations.

ENG 423 Maj Auth: Mariko Tamaki & Jilian Tamaki Comix 5cr

CRN: 10310 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Dietrich, Dawn Y.

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

Assignments and Evaluation

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

Required Texts

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud (PDF)
Skim, Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Roaming, Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki
Cold: A Novel, Mariko Tamaki
This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki
Making Comics, Lynda Barry (PDF)
Selected comix criticism (PDFs)

CRN: 10638 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Prichard, Tony Alan

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

ENG 427 Queer Studies 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from: ENG 227, ENG 313, ENG 314, ENG 351, ENG 353, ENG 354 or equivalent prerequisite coursework and instructor approval; and junior status. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 13871 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Lee, Jean

Black Queer Studies

This course focuses on contemporary Black queer intellectual thought. Though Black lesbian and bisexual thought was the cornerstone of Black feminism in the second half of the 20th century, the field of Black queer studies wasn’t institutionalized in until the late 1990s and more concretely in the 2000s. The transformational impact of Black queer studies across disciplines has been considerable, but more so in the ways it has exceeded the ivory tower in activism and popular culture. While focusing on intersectional frameworks and aesthetics which rigorously deconstruct, analyze, and experiment with categories of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and embodiment, this course also foregrounds how the Black diaspora manifests Black freedom, pleasure, desire, intimacy, and divinity in academic texts and cultural production.

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 will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 12351 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am 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 Tch Eng Lang Arts in Sec Sch I 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302 or ENG 371; ENG 347; ENG 350; ENG 441 or concurrent or MLE 444 or concurrent; and two courses from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320 and ENG 321. Major restrictions do not lift.

CRN: 10085 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Celaya, Anthony Stephen

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

Students will:

Write in a variety of genres.
Read and discuss research, articles, and chapters on methods for teaching secondary composition.
Access a variety of resources when planning and designing writing activities.
Design, deliver, and revise writing assignments and writing lessons.
Develop an understanding of compositional strategies beyond scripted curricula and formalized modes.
Discuss, collaborate, and interact with classmates and future colleagues.

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

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 443. Major restrictions do not lift

CRN: 10639 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven L.

This course is the second of a two-quarter sequence designed to help you become a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and effective teacher of English language arts at the secondary level. In 444 we emphasize the teaching of reading and literature with whole-class, small group, and individualized methods. This methods course requires the same kind of individual initiative, dedication, and professionalism that you will apply to your future work as a teacher.

ENG 451 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Fiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10126 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 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.

CRN: 10543 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Westhoff, Kami Dawn Marie

Seminar in Fiction Writing, 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, submitting your work, and presenting a live reading of your own work. 

ENG 453 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Poetry 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10345 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Winrock, Cori Anne

The Knot

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

ENG 454 Creative Wrtg Sem: Nonfiction 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10331 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Jose

“The World and Me”

True stories, well told. That’s how Lee Gutkind, essayist and “the Godfather” (as Vanity Fair put it in 1997) of the creative nonfiction movement, characterizes the genre. Aldous Huxley, perhaps our most famous literary ‘psychonaut’ thought about it as the movement between a three-poled frame of reference: the personal/autobiographical, the concrete/particular, and the abstract/universal. And as Brooklyn bard Jay-Z puts it, we’ve all got stories to tell. In this class, we will read as writers. That is, we’ll read with a special attunement for “how” questions, such as “how did X author accomplish Y?” The literature we’ll read will engage with the realities of the world – some will be critical, some celebratory, some a beautiful clash of both. Our class will primarily be workshop based. Students will also watch films, lead reading discussions, engage in short in-class writing exercises, and write one piece of creative nonfiction to be “workshopped” by peers. In this class we’ll read about artwork made with prescription pills, medical actors, people who live in a garbage dump, the humble pecan, police violence, and swimming pools.

ENG 455 Living Writers 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One from: ENG 351, ENG 353, ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 13136 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Gulyas, Lee R.

In this multi-genre course, we will explore a mere sliver of contemporary creative writing. We will read, discuss, and write new work based on poetry and creative nonfiction. Authors will visit our class for a conversation about their writing and their process, including the role of influence in creative development. You will create a body of new writing based on these authors’ works.

Class Goals

Through reading, conversation, and lots of writing, workshop and revision, you will:

Gain a stronger understanding of the role of influence in the creative process.
Learn to identify and practice techniques that lead to strong, distinctive contemporary creative writing.
Practice and become fluent in emulation/imitation to strengthen your individual voice.
Hone your ability to receive feedback on drafts and apply feedback in revision.
Create a final project that exhibits a strong, distinctive writing voice influenced by contemporary writers.

ENG 457 Special Topics Poetry Writing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 13137 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Caitlin

Intensive study of poetic texts in traditional and experimental forms. Opportunity to compose in a variety of poetic forms. Study of appropriate models. Repeatable with different instructors to a maximum of 10 credits, including original course.

ENG 459 Editing and Publishing 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10660 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Westhoff, Kami Dawn Marie

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

ENG 460 Multi-Genre Writ: About Animals 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 11457 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Miller, Brenda

Writing About (and With) Animals

“I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present.”

—John Berger

In this multi-genre writing seminar, we will examine the various ways animals function for writers: as characters, as subjects for contemplation, as symbols, as witnesses, as victims, as heroes, etc. Beginning with childhood favorites and working through a variety of genres, we will try to decipher why animals hold such fascination for us as individuals, and how our own depictions of animals can be effective. Students will write several short practice pieces, culminating in a final project that can incorporate multimedia.

ENG 460 MultiGenreWrit: OddForms 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Major restrictions will be lifted on Tuesday Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 10378 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Colen, Elizabeth Jane

Odd Forms: In this generative, workshop-based class we will examine what it means to forgo the standard expectations of genre and venture into the space of attempting to allow content itself to generate form. We will read closely (as closely as possible, given the constraints of a 10-week quarter) many examples of odd forms and delve into them in our own writing through exercises in imitation and by questioning our own content in order to determine what odd forms might be possible for our work. This exploration will culminate in a project proposal and final, fully revised work of 10-15 pages.

ENG 464 Topics in Film Studies 5cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission.

CRN: 13872 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Cosey, Felicia

Film Viewing DAY/TIME: W 05:00-07:50 pm

Elevated Horror

Elevated horror film—also called slow horror, art horror, and indie horror—is a subgenre that embraces storytelling and character development to evoke a profound sense of dread in the spectator. Unlike conventional horror films that rely on graphic violence and jump scares, elevated horror distinguishes itself by gradually building tension and suspense. However, rather than providing viewers with cathartic resolutions involving the antagonist or monstrous entity, the climaxes of elevated horror often leave spectators feeling unsettled, prompting introspective contemplation of their own voyeuristic engagement with the film. With a string of recent successes from production company A24, elevated horror is now mainstream, making it a significant and timely subject to study.

In this course, we will examine elevated horror, delving into its intricate nuances, to gain a deeper understanding of our contemporary cultural climate. Throughout our journey, we will seek answers to the following questions:

Is the increasing popularity of elevated horror a distinctive cultural phenomenon?
If so, what societal events contributed to the influx of elevated horror films over the past decade?
What American cinema releases should we identify as examples of elevated horror if it is not a unique cultural phenomenon?
Is the label "elevated" inherently elitist when applied to this subgenre?
Can we, and should we, consider elevated horror a post-horror genre?

Our exploration will traverse a rich cinematic landscape, beginning with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), and concluding with David Prior's The Empty Man (2020). By critically examining a total of nine films, we will attempt to unravel the compelling tapestry of elevated horror.

While elevated horror is not limited to American cinema—in fact, the genre is deeply influenced by Japanese horror and Italian Giallo—we will focus solely on American productions.

Assignments: Course work will consist of Canvas discussion activities, Hypothesis annotation assignments, a presentation (scene analysis), an Audio Reflection Assignment, and an essay.

Required Textbook: Post-Horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation by David Church

Additional readings will be provided 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 Nov 21 by 10am.

CRN: 12692 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Dorr, Noam

Film Viewing: M 04:00-06:50 pm

This course in film studies and creative writing provides students an introduction to screenwriting. The course focuses on the writing of narrative screenplays, both short and feature length, while also introducing skills applicable to other genres, including the video essay, episodic narrative for the web, and experimental forms.

500-Level English Graduate Courses

ENG 502 Seminar in Writing of Fiction 5cr

CRN: 13873 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Magee, Kelly Elizabeth

This is a graduate seminar in the art of storytelling. “Story” can refer to everything from genre to technique, and it can be applied to fictional narratives of many different shapes, sizes, and styles. The class will examine the generative possibilities and freedom this term can represent for individual writers, as well as how and why certain stories become spotlighted in the contemporary publishing industry. The driving question of the class—what makes a great story—will lead us toward other questions about craft, audience, influence, feedback, process, and ourselves. Open-topic student-produced writing will be the focus of daily conversation, with “the creative writing workshop” being a workshoppable concept itself. Writers will be supported on longer projects, such as theses-in-progress, as well as single, shorter, and/or experimental pieces. Based on class interests and goals, the course may also include secondary emphases in publication, teaching, long-form writing, editing, and performing.

Students will be expected to share their own fiction regularly, formally and informally, as well as respond to the creative work of their peers. All required texts for this course will be available online, and students will be asked to pair one assigned text with a text of their choosing on an assigned day. The class will also include Publication and Presentation Forums where students will collaborate on how they might find their audiences, either now or in the future.

ENG 506 Sem Creative Wrtg: Weird Fiction 5cr

CRN: 13874 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

Together we will explore “weird fiction,” a multi-genre literature with its  fingers in fantasy, surrealism, horror, science fiction, romanticism, symbolism, and gothic literature. As the VanderMeers say of weird fiction, “With unease and the temporary abolition of the rational, can also come the strangely beautiful, intertwined with terror.” 

We will consider the ways in which these aesthetics responded to the concerns of their time. And we’ll consider the ways weird literature (and “New Weird” literature) responds to the anxieties and predicaments of our age and culture. 

Our activities will include:

Identifying a literary movement or genre influential to weird fiction, and offering a short presentation
Creative writing in various shapes and sizes
Workshopping of our personal weird fictions
A “weird research” project
A “weird performance” celebration

A note on our creative works: You will be asked to compose creative works in a multiplicity of shapes. As we experiment with our works and process, we hope to observe how our adherence or resistance to genre conventions offers new ways to explore complex themes and ideas. As a team, we will do an intensive examination of at least one of your creative works (part literary analysis, part workshop). We will also discuss the lifelong concerns of the writer: development, process and community. 

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

We will examine a diverse body of published work across genre boundaries. I attempt to keep course costs as low as possible, but I require access to a few critical materials: 

The Weird (anthology) edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An electronic device (e.g. smart phone) that will allow you to access podcasts

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

CRN: 10089

ENG 510 Rhetoric: African American Rhetoric 5cr

CRN: 10283 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bridges, D'Angelo

The aim of this graduate seminar is to trace the arc of African American rhetoric. We will read a range of work from rhetoric (and allied fields) to consider the work of African American critics in relation to language, communication, and/or suasion. The seminar’s reading list will aim for connectivity rather than comprehensiveness. The goal is for seminarians to explore the ways African Americans have used linguistic and cultural practices to combat anti-Blackness, sexism, colorism, etc. I especially hope students will leave with knowledge about the range of political and social actions African Americans have used to counter the racial prejudice and systemic oppression they encounter in America.

ENG 540 Globl Lits: Sci-Fi Before Swift 5cr

CRN: 12352 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

SCI-FI BEFORE SWIFT

Science fiction scholar John Rieder asserts that SF has no single point of origin, and that SF is not any one set of texts but rather a practice for reading and drawing relationships among texts. In this seminar, our goal is to build a deeper understanding of genre theory and global literary history by approaching sixteenth and seventeenth century literature as part of the multifaceted, ever-evolving history of SF. How are texts written hundreds of years ago connected to what Darko Suvin terms the literature of cognitive estrangement? To what Grace Dillon names Indigenous futurisms? To what Rieder calls the stubbornly visible colonial scenario beneath the fantastic script of SF? We will read around 100-150 pages per week (including both primary texts and scholarly essays) for eight weeks and reserve the last two weeks of class to construct research project proposals.

Our reading list includes Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609), Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Letter to a King (1612-15), William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-11), Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s First Dream (1692), and various contemporary scholarly articles. Students will be responsible for reading and annotating primary texts in advance of seminar meetings, participating actively in discussions, preparing two in-class presentations, annotating scholarly articles, and writing a research project proposal with an annotated bibliography. Attending more than 75 percent of class meetings is required to receive credit for this class. You will need to purchase three books for this class, and the rest of our readings will be optional to purchase/available as PDFs.

PLEASE NOTE: This is an 8AM class in the winter quarter, which means we will begin our time together in total darkness and watch the dawn inch earlier and earlier after that. This is my favorite time of year; I absolutely love witnessing the spring slowly creep in. If you don’t fully embrace the darkness like I do but you still want to take this class, I am happy to discuss holding our seminar at a breakfast spot on some days or any other strategies that would make the early time more manageable.

ENG 550 Studies in American Literature 5cr

CRN: 13875 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Warburton, Theresa Anne

Using the frameworks provided through both critical and queer Indigenous studies, this course examines how contemporary Native authors use a variety of literary genres to explore the connections between colonialism, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and feminism. We will be guided by the premise that Native and Indigenous literatures produce, rather than only respond to, theoretical concepts and method. Knowing this, we will then ask: “what theories, concepts, and methods do these texts produce and how?” 

Specifically eschewing a model that takes an anthropological approach to the study of Native literatures as descriptive narratives of experience, we will explore how such authors are challenging foundational assumptions of gender, sexuality, feminist, and queer studies while asserting frameworks for addressing core questions of power, sovereignty, identity, and politics that are both long-standing and innovative. We will pay special attention to how texts from these authors make use of craft and form to make arguments about gender and sexuality. Focusing on texts published after 2000, we will examine such works within the context of Native literary history as well as the intersection of queer and Native studies. 

Students can expect a high reading load that spans both critical theory and literary texts across genres, accompanied by written assignments that familiarize them with techniques and skills useful in graduate-level literary studies

ENG 580 Studies in Film 5cr

CRN: 13139 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Youmans, Greg

Film Viewing DAY/TIME: M 04:00-06:50 pm

This seminar is designed to introduce students to graduate-level work in the field of film and media studies. In the first half of the quarter, we will read some of the foundational texts of theory and criticism along with a recent book that makes a fresh intervention in the field. In the second half of the term, we will focus on readings and screenings that are directly tied to each student’s interests. Past iterations of the course have included units on Black independent cinema, queer and trans representation, science fiction and techno-thrillers, experimental film, digital media theory, and video games. In addition to short written engagements with each week’s readings, students will work toward a final paper and presentation in their area of interest. Time permitting, everyone will also design and create a media project that elucidates, complicates, or challenges one or more of the works of theory we’ve read together.

Winter 2024 Course Descriptions

Table of Contents

100-Level English Courses

200-Level English Courses

300-Level English Courses

400-Level English Courses

Graduate English Courses

Registration Questions?

100-Level English Courses

ENG 100 Intro to College Writing 5cr

CRN: 12617 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU 5cr

View CRNs and DAY/TIMEs on Browse Classes in Web4U.

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 WritinHumanit:PopMusic 5cr

CRN: 10655 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5cr

CRN: 10058 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

CRN: 10181 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Roach Orduna, Caitlin

CRN: 10488 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Weed, Katie

CRN: 10656 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: VanderStaay, Steven L.

CRN: 10657 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: To Be Announced

CRN: 10658 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

ENG 203 Wrtg for Public&Prof Audiences 5cr

CRN: 12625 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Bell, Michael Patrick

ENG 216 American Literature 5cr

CRN: 13122 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

ENG 235 Native/Indigenous Literatures 5cr

CRN: 13865 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Redwoman, Zoe

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg&Public: Hip Hop Culture 5cr

CRN: 10324 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Bridges, D'Angelo

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5cr

CRN: 10308 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Brown, Nicole

CRN: 10352 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 10395 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsberg, Geri

CRN: 10444 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: McGuire, Simon Leonard

CRN: 10499 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

CRN: 11092 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Sarkar, Rachel Diane

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5cr

CRN: 12088 DAY/TIME: MWF 08:30-09:50 am Instructor: Amendt-Raduege, Amy Michelle

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5cr

CRN: 11286 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00-11:50 am Instructor: Laffrado, Laura

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5cr

CRN: 11287 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Hardman, Pam

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

CRN: 11288 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Heim, Stefania F.

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5cr

CRN: 10081 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00-02:20 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5cr

CRN: 12341 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

CRN: 12342 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5cr

CRN: 12343 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00-01:50 pm Instructor: Forsythe, Jenny Marie

ENG 320 Survey: The Long 19th C 5cr

CRN: 11867 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00-09:50 am Instructor: Giffen, Allison A.

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

CRN: 12633 DAY/TIME: TR 04:00-05:50 pm Instructor: Lester, Mark M.

ENG 333 Glbl Lit: Scribes & Griots 5cr

CRN: 13959 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

ENG 335 TxtsOutAm&Eur: Senegal 5cr

CRN: 13960 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

ENG 336 Scriptural Lit: 5cr

CRN: 13866 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30-12:50 pm Instructor: Loar, Christopher F.

ENG 337 Trvl Writing in the Sahel 2cr

CRN: 13961 Instructor: Wise, Christopher

ENG 339 Mythology and Literature 5cr

CRN: 13126 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00-11:20 am Instructor: Vulic, Kathryn Rajam

ENG 345 Film&Media Ac. AsiaAfricaMELA 5cr

CRN: 13868 DAY/TIME: TR 02:00-03:50 pm Instructor: Odabasi, Eren

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5cr

CRN: 10659 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30-03:50 pm Instructor: Hardman, Pam

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5cr

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