DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio.

Texts include: A course reader.

Note: This course is open to first-year students admitted in Fall 2017.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to a range of Shakespeare’s comedies,
tragedies, histories and romances. During the quarter, we will be considering these plays in their
Early Modern context—cultural, political, literary and theatrical. We will focus centrally on matters of
performance and text. How is our interpretation of a play shaped by Shakespeare’s various “texts”—
his stories and their histories, the works of his contemporaries, the latest literary fashions, and the
various versions of his plays that circulated among his audience? Similarly, how do the details of
a given performance, or the presence of a particular audience, alter the experience of the play? To
answer these questions, we will consider not only the theaters of Early Modern England, but also
recent cinematic versions of the plays, and we will not only read our modern edition of Shakespeare
but also examine some pages from the plays as they originally circulated. Our readings may include
Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Henry V, and the Tempest.

Teaching Methods: Lectures with Q&A; required weekly discussion section.

Evaluation Methods: Attendance and section participation, two papers, midterm, final exam.

Texts include: The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. Available at Beck’s Bookstore.

Course Description: Edgar Allan Poe invented the short story, the detective story, the science fiction story, and modern poetic theory. His stories and essays anticipate the Freudian unconscious and various forms of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and modern critical theory. Poe wrote a spooky novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and several volumes of poetry and short stories. As editor or contributor to many popular nineteenth-century American magazines, he wrote sketches, reviews, essays, angelic dialogues, polemics, and hoaxes. This course will focus on Poe’s writings as a means of learning how to read and analyze a variety of literary genres, including lyric and narrative poems, the novel, the short story, detective fiction, science fiction, the essay, the literary review, and critical theory. We will study poetic language, image, meter, and form as well as various storytelling techniques such as narrative point of view, plot, structure, language, character, repetition and recurrence, and implied audience. We will also study a variety of critical approaches to reading and interpreting Poe’s writings, including formalist, psychoanalytic, historicist, Marxist, feminist, queer, critical race, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theory and criticism. We will conclude by looking at the ways Poe’s works have been translated and adapted in a selection of contemporary films and other pop cultural forms.

Teaching Method: Some lecture; mostly close-reading and discussion.

Evaluation Method:  2 short essays (3-4 pages); and one longer essay (8-10 pages); in-class participation.

Texts include: Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (Library of America); M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham: A Glossary of Literary Terms (Thomson, 8thEdition); Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds.: Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, rev. ed.).

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

Course Description: Spell-casting witches, blood-sucking vampires, mindless zombies, evil robots, and invading aliens. What do our obsessions with specific supernatural, technological, or extraterrestrial threats to humanity tell us about cultural investments at a specific time and place? In this course, we will examine popular culture’s preoccupation with supernatural or extra-worldly “villains” in literature, nonfiction, films, and other media. This course will contextualize those trends in the historical, cultural, and political anxieties or interests of the time, including contemporaneous ideas of national identity, gender and sexuality, and developments in science and technology. For instance, the recent popularity of zombies has been linked to fears about increasing globalization, and alien invasion was a particularly popular theme in movies and literature at the intersection of the Cold War and humans’ exploration of space. Course material will also include satires of these crazes, which often expose the fears or desires underlying our fascination with particular literary figures or genres. We will investigate existing academic and nonfiction theses about why certain threats to humanity are popular in certain cultural moments; we will also develop our own hypotheses about why particular “monsters” or narratives captivate the popular imagination.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Two papers, Canvas posts, participation; final group presentation.

Texts include: Bram Stoker, Dracula; H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds; Orson Welles, War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast; Isaac Asimov, I, Robot; Max Brooks, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide; George Romero, Night of the Living Dead.

Texts will be available at: Beck’s, Quartet Copies.

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit. Students completing this section of English 300 may not take the section of English 368 offered in the spring with the same topic.

Post-1830

Course Description: How did the Romantic poetry and visual art of William Blake come to inspire later artistic misfits and countercultures? How has his example pushed poetics beyond the page? This course explores the unique poetry of Blake alongside its experimental, politically committed, sometimes hallucinogenic afterlives. Obscure and barely read during his own life, the eccentric Blake might be seen as the prototype of the artistic genius ahead of his or her time, but today we can safely say that his star has risen many times over: in poetry, from the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, to Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and Allen Ginsburg; and across the arts, from Diane Arbus (in photography) to Jackson Pollack (in painting), Patti Smith (in music), and Kenzaburo Oe (in fiction), Blake’s afterlives have proliferated in the 20th century, spanning aesthetic ideologies from the Beat poets to surrealism, abstract expressionism, anti-war art, and punk. Emphasis will be placed on the poetic inventiveness of Blake’s mixed-media forms, and his attempts to reinvent the literary object, as we compare his own illuminated poetry and innovative printing techniques with successors, across artistic media. The course is run in parallel with the Block Museum of Art’s exhibit, “William Blake and the Age of Aquarius”; a number of our classes and assignments will focus on works displayed and events held in conjunction with this exhibit.

Teaching Method: Brief lectures, seminar-style discussion, group exercises, field trips.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, weekly writing/creative assignments, short presentation, midterm paper, final project.

Texts may include: William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books (Thames & Hudson) (must be ordered online); OR William Blake, Songs of Innocence & Experience (Dover Fine Art) and The Marriageof Heaven and Hell (Dover Fine Art).

Note: The above course is combined with COMP_LIT 312-0.

Course Description: From London’s fastidious Sherlock Holmes to Los Angeles’s smooth-talking private eyes, detectives have developed into some of the most popular characters in British and American fiction alike. In this course, we will trace the origins and the evolution of detective stories in order to uncover the various roles that these popular figures have played in the representation of crime and its punishment. Turning our attention to a range of examples, including the traditional gentleman (Sherlock), the spunky teenager (Veronica Mars), and the real-life sleuth (the makers of Serial), we will interrogate the ways in which detectives have shaped our understanding of the law, the people who break it, and those who uphold it. What do we learn about society when we see it through detectives’ eyes? How do the stories that detectives tell—about themselves or about the suspects they investigate—impact the way that we view crime? And in what ways do detectives aid or challenge the legal systems in which they operate?

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Participation; three essays.

Texts include: Edgar Allan Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”; Arthur Conan Doyle, selections from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; BBC’s Sherlock; Agatha Christie, selections from Poirot Investigates; John Huston, The Maltese Falcon; The CW’s Veronica Mars; Serial.

Texts will be available at: course packet available at Quarter copies; films and episodes will be available for screening on Canvas site.

Pre-1830

Course Description: Some of the most compelling poets of early modern England were also religious thinkers. John Donne was an Anglican priest, who preached to thousands as the Dean of St Paul’s in London. George Herbert was a parish priest in a small village who wrote about the duties of his office.  John Milton engaged in high-risk political efforts to transform England into the new Promised Land.  This course will focus on the religious controversies that prevailed in early modern England and the ways these thinkers responded to them in their poetry.  The controversies issued in new definitions of what the Good is, how power should be apportioned, and how signs have meaning. The specific arguments can seem odd in our more secular era: Why was so much blood shed over the meaning of the wafer and the wine in the Mass? Why did anyone care what the priest wore? Why were there fights over where the altar was placed in the church? But our goal will be to understand what was at stake in these and related questions as they are engaged in the very different styles of Donne, Milton and Herbert. 

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: You will be asked to offer a class presentation, write a short paper of 2-3 pages, and a longer one of 8-10 pages. Full class attendance and participation are required.

Texts include: TBA.

Note: This course is co-listed with English 388-0-20, which fulfills the Area V (Ethics and Values) and Area VI (Literature & Fine Arts) distribution requirements, and Religion 349-0-20. To fulfill both distribution requirements with this class, you must enroll in English 388 or Religion 349.

Pre-1830

Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time.

Teaching Method: Class discussion and lecture.

Evaluation Method: Papers, class presentation, class participation.

Texts Include: Paradise Lost by John Milton.

This course will be an intensive study of one of the most critically acclaimed novels ever written: George Eliot's Middlemarch. This is the classic and complex tale of a young woman of extraordinary talents thrust at the age of nineteen into a suffocating marriage. It is a brilliant portrait of the subtle, agonizing moral dilemmas at the heart of everyday life. In its rich social tapestry of scientific and political visionaries, of bankers and bohemians, farmers and lords, Eliot traces the complex tangle of ambition and frustration, of betrayal and compromise, and of spiritual awakening and deadening. We will read the novel slowly and carefully, probing the richness of its language, its philosophical meditations and its complex human psychology, and we will investigate its literary and historical context by reading scholarly essays on a host of fascinating background topics.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: 3 papers (3, 4, 6 pp.), contribution to seminar discussion.

Texts include: George Eliot, Middlemarch (Broadview Press edition edited by Gregory Maertz -- this is essential! ISBN-13: 978-1551112336).

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore, though students are encouraged to acquire the book in advance, either at a local bookstore or online.

Course Description: Literature always resists -- even as it demands -- interpretation.  In certain texts of modern literature, the resistance to interpretation issues into a particularly violent struggle in which points of defiance are difficult to distinguish from moments of defeat.  This class will examine some of the literary texts of modernity and the tendency of these texts toward two interpretive gestures or situations:  incomprehensible self-closure (and the attendant contraction of a space for self-legitimation) and an equally incomprehensible self-expansiveness (and the exhilarating, scary freedom it entails).  We will begin the course with the enigmatic words of resistance repeated by Melville’s odd scrivener, Bartleby (“I prefer not to”), and end with the apocalyptic conclusion to Ellison’s Invisible Man (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”).

Teaching Methods: Brief lectures and discussion.

Evaluation Methods: One in-class presentation, one 3-4 page paper, one 5-6 page paper, one final project/paper.

Texts include: Texts will likely include novels and short stories by Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, John Okada, Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip Roth.

Note: This course is combined with COMP_LIT 301-0-20.

This course will focus on the art of politics and the politics of the literary imagination in Revolutionary America as a means of rethinking traditional accounts of both the literature and politics of the American Revolution. Radically utopian in its desire and vision, the American Revolution was also driven by feelings of loss, betrayal, anger, and fear, and haunted by the specter of ghosts, insurrection, and apocalypse. We will explore the affective, sensational, and specifically literary shaping of various founding documents as a means of illuminating some of the more visionary, terroristic, and contradictory aspects of the American Revolution; and we will consider the ways the imaginative writings of the time -- poems, letters, autobiographies, novels of seduction, the gothic, and the terrors of Islam -- reveal aspects of the "real" American Revolution that were repressed, silenced, or written out of the more official writings of the Revolution.

Teaching Methods: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Essay (3 pages); essay (5-6 pages); participation; final examination.

Texts include: Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence and selections from Notes on the State of Virginia; Letters of Abigail and John Adams; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Phillis Wheatley, Poems; Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers; Hannah Foster, The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker; Royal Tyler, The Algerine Captive.

This course offers an overview of the interdisciplinary field of "oceanic studies," focusing on the great literary, scientific, and cinematic documents of modern seafaring. Writers may include Columbus, Cook, Darwin, Coleridge, Dana, Melville, Conrad, Woolf, O'Neill, Joji, Traven, Mutis, and/or Goldman. How have seas, sailors, ships and their cargoes helped to shape our imagination and understanding of major events and processes of modernity, such as the discovery of the New World, slavery, industrial capitalism, marine science, the birth of environmental consciousness, and contemporary globalization? What part did seafaring play in the formation of international legal systems, or in epochal events such as the American and Russian Revolutions? How does the rise in contemporary piracy compare to its "golden age" forerunners? How can we discern the history of the "trackless" oceans, and how do we imagine their future now that "90% of everything" crosses an ocean, and the seas are variously described as rising or dying? Our focus in the course will be on writers listed above, but our approach will be radically interdisciplinary, so we will also watch a few films (by Jacques Cousteau, Gillo Pontecorvo and Allen Sekula), and we will read short excerpts from the disciplines of "critical theory" (Heller-Roazen, Foucault, Deleuze, Corbin), labor and economic history (Rediker, Fink, Levinson), and environmental thought (Carson, Alaimo).

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Short writing exercises and midterm essays; experimental in-class presentations; final projects developed in consultation with instructor.

Texts include: See above. Contact instructor nearer to enrollment for final list.

Note: The above course is combined with COMP LIT 390-0.

In this course, we will investigate literature about and the rhetorical conventions of branding, advertising, and commercialism. Our exploration will include examining the history of marketing literary texts, such as advertisements for Charles Dickens' serialized novels, as well as narratives concerning advertising or consumerism. Moreover, students will learn to analyze marketing campaigns, advertisements, and television commercials. What cultural assumptions -- e.g., about gender, class, or race -- can we discover by analyzing the rhetoric and imagery of specific advertisements or branding strategies? An overarching question in the course will be the relationship between high and low culture: when might advertising count as art, and does the popularity of a literary text detract from its aesthetic or literary value? How does the pervasiveness of advertising influence what a society desires or values? We will read broadly, from stories that are set in or satirize the world of advertising or explore themes of consumerism and marketing, to nonfiction texts that discuss or deconstruct advertising and consumer culture.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, two papers, Canvas posts, final group presentation.

Texts include: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer; Dorothy Sayers, Death and Advertising; Jerry Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor; short stories by Fritz Leiber, Emile Zola, Flannery O'Connor, and Virginia Woolf; and selections from Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man; and Roland Barthes, Mythologies. From film and television, we will watch episodes of Mad Men; The Thrill of It All; and Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women.

Texts will be available at: Books at Beck's; Course Reader at Quartet Copies.

The present situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas gleaned from readings by Virginia Woolf, Martha Nussbaum, Lewis Hyde, Adrienne Rich, Ta Nehisi Coates and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with an interview with another writer; a service learning assignment; and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Many of our Thursdays will be enhanced by the "Return Engagements" series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern's Writing Program who have gone on to forge careers in the literary arts. We will read their writing and open time for you to talk with them about continued education, publishing, agenting and editing. This course is designed especially for students who hope to forge careers as writers, and it will challenge all participants to think creatively about the space of literature in our changing society.

Note: ENGLISH 392 is a requirement for all senior creative writing majors. Other students may enroll with department consent.

This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get.

Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops.

Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback.

Texts Include: TBA

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only

From video games and board games to game shows and sports, games saturate our culture and shape who we are. Some scholars have even argued that games are replacing novels and film as the dominant form of cultural expression. Others view games as a frivolous and unproductive activity, not worthy of serious study. In this seminar, we will explore some of the fundamental questions about the relationship between games and human culture. Why do people play games? What kinds of meanings, cultural values and political agendas do games encode? Do games function differently than other cultural objects, such as films, novels or works of art? What might it mean to think of all culture and works of art as arising from a "play impulse"? And if this is the case, why do we trivialize game-playing? Is the ubiquity of games in our lives a specifically modern phenomenon? Is the advent of the digital age producing a gamification of everyday life? To investigate these questions, we will read a wide range of critical writing about the importance of play and games in human culture, by philosophers, novelists, literary critics, social scientists, historians and game designers. The class will give you an opportunity to develop a 12-15 page research paper that studies one particular game or aspect of game culture in-depth. In the process, you will learn how to frame a significant research question; articulate a research proposal; navigate scholarly databases and archives; evaluate sources; and, produce an annotated bibliography.

Teaching Methods: The class will be run as a seminar. In addition to discussing the critical readings on play and texts about research methods, we will workshop student proposals and drafts, and talk about each student's research project in detail.

Evaluation Methods: Attendance; preparation for seminar; discussion; Canvas posts; peer review; research proposal; annotated bibliography; drafts; final research paper (12-15pp.).

Texts include: Craft of Research; Kant, Critique of Judgment; Schiller, Letters on Aesthetic Education; Morris, News from Nowhere; Huizinga, Homo Ludens; Caillois, Man, Play and Games; Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play; Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution; Sicart, Play Matters; Galloway, Gaming.

Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students must successfully complete 4-6 300-level English courses before taking English 397.

The queer and the oriental are two figures on the wrong sides of Western philosophies of world history. Imagined as perverted deviations from, or inverted reflections of, a progress from despotic ancestral pasts to free reproductive futures, the queer and oriental are two species of wrong which resist being "raised up" or "sublated" into higher generalities of rightness and whiteness. Too wrong for history, these two wrongs also cannot be rectified or reduced into each other -- but not for lack of trying. Over the course of the long twentieth century, a seemingly endless pile-up of cultural productions has positioned Orientals as queers or featured queers Orientalizing themselves and others. The mind-gagging accumulation of such productions illustrates how thoroughly such maneuvers never really work; or rather, how they work, like desires often do, by never being fulfilled.

The seminar opens with the ongoing tension between two different departures from Hegel's philosophy of world history -- economic materialist approaches exemplified by Marx and genealogical approaches exemplified by Nietzsche. We will explore how constitutive tensions between these approaches -- variously described as "materialist vs. idealist," "total vs. fragmentary," and "restricted vs. general" -- have been a recurrent feature of work in queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. In a twist on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's statement that "any understanding of virtually aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate an analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition," the aim of this seminar is to pursue the irresolvable corollaries to the axiomaticity of "modern Western culture." Our mantra will be: any understanding of virtually any aspect of homo/ heterosexual definition must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate an analysis of non/modern non/ Western division.

We will combine our theoretical explorations with the pragmatic task of "coverage." Accordingly, we will read texts defined as "canonical" by virtue of having been placed on departmental qualifying exam lists, a series of placements that happily accords with the texts having been touchstones for critics over the last four decades. Such texts include works by Christina Rosetti, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Maxine Hong Kingston. We will also read works by Malinda Lo and Yone Noguchi.

As this is a fall quarter seminar, I will not require the production of a full-length end-of-term research paper; the default final assignment will be a conference paper with annotated bibliography. (The option to write a full-length paper will remain open to those who wish to pursue it). In addition, the seminar will place more emphasis on foundational skills of graduate-level knowledge production: close reading and reading for argumentative structure; construction and analysis of fi eld bibliographies or "lists"; and oral presentation, prepared and extemporaneous.