Time Schedule:
Gianna G Craig
ENGL 200
Seattle Campus
Covers techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, and film. Examines such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. Offered: AWSp.
Class description
This course will introduce students to reading a range of literary texts—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, film, etc.—for academic engagement and enjoyment. Throughout the quarter, we will explore “Literary Maps” in order to better understand the relationship between place, identity, history, and culture. “Mapping” will serve as both an object of literary study and a critical approach to reading practice in the course. Our goal will be to understand how the course texts chart national culture and history onto geographical space. Furthermore, we will consider what is at stake in the production and interpretation of these literary maps of U.S. sites and landscapes. As we read, we will attend to each work’s historical context as well as the varied social positions that these texts represent in relation to race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will begin our inquiry in the mid-19th century and we will proceed chronologically through a board selection of texts that map and analyze American places and spaces. We will conclude the course by turning to a selection of fiction and poetry centered in Seattle in order to consider the politics of living and circulating in particular places and spaces.
While the course theme establishes an organizational logic for the class, students’ interests and ideas will shape how we read the course texts as the term develops. Students will be encouraged to raise their own questions about the material throughout the quarter. Along the way, this class will provide strategies for close reading, analyzing literature, and writing in an academic context. Students will be expected to think critically about the course materials and to actively participate in class activities, including lectures, group presentations, group work, and class discussions.
This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement by requiring 10-12 pages of graded, out-of-class writing.
Our primary texts will likely include: William and Ellen Craft, Running A Thousand Miles to Freedom Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying John Okada, No-No Boy
A course reader, including short stories, poetry, essays, and other short selections of theory and literary criticism, will also be required.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
