Hello, CSE majors! The English department is offering a few literature classes related to technology. All fulfill VLPA credit, and can fulfill your additional Writing requirements.
Literature and Technology Classes – Winter 2017
Did you know that Ada Lovelace, regarded as the first computer programmer, was the daughter of the nineteenth-century poet Lord Byron? Technology and literature have long gone hand-in-hand: products of our creativity, our inspiration, and our cultural desire to organize our lives. Studying technology and literature together provides a rounded kind of insight: the human and cultural implications of our machines and our electronics.
The English department offers opportunities for students to combine their study in tech fields with investigations of the written word and the stories that we tell with it. One of the benefits of studying technology at UW is that the U provides more than simply learning code or design, it provides a wealth of opportunity to see the intellectual intersections of these with academic fields. Moreover, the current tech market depends upon people skilled in reading and writing, so taking courses in English can be both intellectually and professionally important.
Most of these courses satisfy VLPA requirements; some provide “W” credit automatically and some offer optional “W” credit (contact the instructor about whether “W” credit is possible).
ENGL 200: Astride the Divide: Poetry and Science in Early Modernity (VLPA, plus W)
instructor: Sam Hushagen
The disciplinary divide between literary study and the sciences, between knowledge of making (or poesis) and theoretical knowledge seems inevitable from our contemporary vantage. After all, the dispute between poetry and philosophy was old enough that Plato in The Republic (in the 4th century BCE) could refer to it as an “ancient quarrel.” And while recently some have tried to make STEM into STEAM by smuggling the arts between engineering and mathematics, the separation of aesthetic from scientific education appears natural. But what is the history of this separation? How were poetic and scientific knowledge distinguished from one another, and how did the contemporary understanding of these “two cultures,” emerge?
These are just a few of the questions that this course will explore as we study institutionalization of the divide between science and poetry in early modernity. Through readings in history and philosophy of science, early scientific texts, and poetry we will explore continuities between scientific and poetic knowledge, and study what makes them different. We will pay special attention to how disciplinary training reinforces Plato’s “ancient quarrel” by inducing students into forms and habits of research, and consider what is gained – and what is lost – in processes of acculturation. As we go I will ask you to reflect in informal written assignments on your own disciplinary training.
ENGL 266: Literature & Technology: The History and Future of the Book (VLPA, plus optional W)
Instructor: Jeffrey Todd Knight
iPad and Kindle, cell-phone novels and e-publishing, Amazon and the fate of the American bookstore. Since the turn of the 21st century, our relationship with the book – and with it, literature itself – has been transformed. What is this analog device that gave shape to writing and storytelling for over 1500 years? Where is it going in the new digital era?
This course offers an introduction to “the book” as a literary technology from ancient wax tablets to today’s tablet PCs. Instead of following the usual arc of literary history in a succession of authors or periods, we will explore the work of writers and readers – primarily in English – as imaginative uses of a variety of book-media: papyrus rolls, animal-skin manuscripts, printed codices, mass-produced periodicals, and e-books, to name a few. Readings will cluster around four or five sustained case studies and will include at least one very old poem, a Shakespeare play, a modern novel, and a piece of cutting-edge digital fiction. Evaluation will be based on a mix of exams, short writing assignments, in-class exercises, and an “adopt-a-book” project in Allen Library Special Collections, where we will gain hands-on experience with actual relics of literary history. Students will leave this introductory course with knowledge of exemplary works of English literature along with fundamental concepts in the study of media.
ENGL 282: Intermediate Multimodal Composition (VLPA, plus Composition or W)
instructor: Zhenzhen He
Strategies for composing effective multimodal texts for print, digital physical delivery, with focus on affordances of various modes–words, images, sound, design, and gesture–and genres to address specific rhetorical situations both within and beyond the academy. Although the course has no prerequisites, instructors assume knowledge of academic writing.
ENGL 349: Fantasy and Science Fiction: Introduction to Science Fiction (VLPA)
instructor: Tom Foster
This version of this course is designed to provide a historical introduction to print science fiction as a genre, with a strong but not exclusive emphasis on the development of the genre in the U.S. during the 20th century. The course will be organized around debates over the definition of science fiction that are internal to the science fiction field. We will therefore read examples of pulp adventure narratives; the hard SF tradition promoted by John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding (later Analog); alternative forms that begin to emerge in the 1950s, including early feminist science fiction and the more self-consciously literary narratives associated with Anthony Boucher’s Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as the traditions of social satire and political SF associated with H.L. Gold’s magazine Galaxy; the “New Wave” movement of the 1960s and 70s; cyberpunk fiction and responses to it; and the interventions of SFF (science fiction and fantasy) writers of color.
In addition to this historical narrative, the critical concerns that we will consider include the historical and ideological contexts for science fiction narratives, such as the traditions of travel writing and utopian/dystopian speculation, and the formal tension between science fiction’s tendency toward a realist aesthetic and its simultaneous commitment to the fantastic and to imagining departures from realism that often have the effect of defamiliarizing our assumptions about what is normal. We will be especially interested in arguments about the colonial roots of science fiction (and utopian literature) in European travel writing and voyages of exploration, and in arguments about whether and how the genre might be decolonized, especially by writers of color.
Primary readings for the course will include essays and stories available in electronic form, as pdfs on the course Canvas site, as well as the following set of books: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars; Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man; Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Nalo Hopkinson, Report from Planet Midnight; Octavia Butler, Dawn; Nisi Shawl, Filter House; and Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life. There is one book for the course that is suggested only: James M. Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), Her Smoke Rose Up Forever; we will read some Tiptree stories as part of a cluster of short works of feminist science fiction, but those stories will also be made available as pdfs, so that you are not required to buy the Tiptree book. Assignments for the course will probably include two essays, and some shorter, informal writing assignments.