teaching:
Below is a list of the class I have taught since receiving a teaching assistantship at the University of Washington in 2004. Each appears with the course number, my course title, and, where applicable, a link to the courses website.
2009-2010
Comparative History of Ideas 496: Focus Group
Bioshock: Cyborg Morality and Posthuman Choice
2K’s CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED first-person shooter Bioshock (Xbox360, PS3, PC) presents body modification as the natural outgrowth of an individualist ethic institutionalized as the foundation of a utopian society called Rapture. The game box describes: “BioShock is a shooter unlike any you’ve ever played, loaded with weapons and tactics never seen. You’ll have a complete arsenal at your disposal...but you’ll be forced to genetically modify your DNA to create an even more deadly weapon: you.” As players navigate the fallen city of Rapture, the game presumes to offer player the choice to embody its Ayn Rand-esque morality or to resist it, weaving the player’s in-game decisions into the development of the plot. Bioshock thus affords us an excellent opportunity to investigate the moral, political, and cultural issues attached to body modification and posthumanism more broadly.
OUR FOCUS GROUP, as part of a continuing series on video games generated by the Critical Gaming Project at UW, will address technological and biological determinism, individuality and objectivism, post- and transhumanism, and technological mediations of race, gender, and sexuality. Playing Bioshock and a selection of cyberpunk short stories will be deployed as theory alongside formal video game and posthuman critical theory. Readings may include texts by Cory Doctorow, Maureen McHugh, Geoff Ryman, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Alexander Galloway, Clint Hocking, and others.
THE COURSE will meet once a week for 2 hours to engage guided discussion, analytical and reflective writing, and game play. There will be no formal paper requirements, but students will be asked to participate in online discussion and keep a weekly play-log (plog).
[website]
2008-2009
English 213: Modernism/Postmodernism
Make It [New] Media: Contemporary [Post]Modernity
The 20th century is often characterized as a period of artistic and literary experimentation in which language, narrative, and form were stretched to their limits in the search for new forms of expression. Writers from this period sought to break from, make new, and/or poke fun at literary tradition and conventional language use. Their work, as a result, was controversial and even shocking at the time. Much of it is still considered quite difficult today. And yet, vestiges of these experimental techniques can be found in everyday experiences of contemporary, digital culture. This class will examine several of these "shocking" techniques including collage and montage, the fragmentation of identity, decentering of narrative, and others as they are manifested in representational works from the modern and postmodern era. My hope is that we will be able to use our familiarity with such contemporary cultural practices as the remixing readymade media-objects, telepresent communication and online identity performance, and surfing the internet with hyperlinks, in order to gain perspective on the aesthetic devices that have defined 20th-century literature.
[website]
Comparative History of Ideas 496: Focus Group
Pandora's Wake: The Idea of Hope across Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Media
"The act-content of hope is, as a consciously illuminated, knowingly elucidated content, the positive utopian function; the historical content of hope, first represented in ideas, encyclopaedically explored in real judgments, is human culture referred to its concrete-utopian function." -Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
The contemporary American moment seems pregnant with the theme of hope, particularly in political and historical contexts: hope is often aligned with ideas of change and novelty, national perseverance and optimism, defiance of historical precedents, and even utopian imagining. The apotheosis of hope as a cultural idea can sometimes obscure the experience of hope – its conditions and the shifting horizons of meaning for the individual and their acts. The legacy of the Greek myth of Pandora provides an interesting reflection on hope that is complex and ultimately ambiguous. Pandora, we learn, opens a jar that releases all the problems of human existence out into the world, leaving only hope to remain. Hope becomes that which remains – the ambiguous kernel that is reserved in the resealed jar. One popular understanding of the myth (which seems to inform the heart of our moment today) sees hope as a remaining counterweight to our problems, marking hope as an idea that we might orient our lives with, aiming us toward the future. Yet, there is another, contrary view of the myth which sees hope as that which is withheld from existence, that which is removed, obscured, or absent as a reserve for action. It is this latter view which seems to inform post-apocalyptic explorations of existence in which hope ceases to function as “that which remains,” a kind of imagined reserve that orients us toward the future. There is a long tradition of these explorations in literature, film, and now digital games, all of which prompt us to ask: What forms does hope take in a post-apocalyptic context, when our notions and means of civil life, our traditional political, historical, and everyday cultural coordinates for thinking the “act-content” of hope have been revoked, destroyed, rendered obsolete or impossible?
This focus group will be grounded in a comparative study of 3 contemporary artworks that deal with experiences of existence after the ends of things – of family, civility, modern ways and means of living, civilization, biological life itself. We will read Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006), viewing Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and playing Black Isle Studios’s Fallout 2 (1999, in lieu of Fallout 3, 2008). These “post-apocalyptic” experiences in contemporary media give us a great opportunity to explore the idea of hope in a critical way.
[website]
English 282: Composing for the Web
This class will address the ways in which the task of composition changes in online contexts. All assignments will involve bottom-up website development. So, the first section of the course will cover the basics of coding in HTML and CSS. We will then look at the history of the internet, new media technologies, and writing for the web. From there, we will discuss the brief history of theorization of writing for the web, highlighting the specific features and capabilities, stakes and consequences of web composition. We will conclude by using these histories to analyze websites, web applications, and web-based narratives. Our final project will involve applying what we have discussed to develop a web-based discussion of course themes.
In keeping with the concept of the course, course readings will be available electronically. As mentioned above, course assignments will take the form of web pages that put into practice the tactics and theories discussed in class. There will be no final test, but there will be a final web-based project. Attendance is required, as is participation in discussion both on and offline.
N.B. This is not a composition class, nor is it a class on coding languages. It is a class on the theory and practice of web composition. As such, that will be our focus. This class takes place in a computer lab and we will talk about basic coding concepts, but students will be largely responsible for knowing or learning HTML&CSS on their own. In that vein, basic familiarity with a PC, the internet, and web browsers is recommended, but not required.
[website]
English 242: Reading Fiction
Immersion and Interactivity
Fiction doesn’t really happened, yet, it enjoys a prolifically nuanced relationship with reality. This class will focus on two related phenomenon central to this relationship, immersion and interactivity. Immersion, the reader’s sense of “being really there” in the story that never happened, and interactivity, the real reader’s role in the unfolding of fictional events, should give us a way into thinking about what it means to read fiction and how it is stories become real for us. To explore these ideas, we will read a variety of fictions featuring a variety of points of readerly access with attention to the ways in which each text situates us as readers of it. In the end, we will begin to draw out the complexity of the interplay between the text and the real that is at the heart of what it means to read fiction and undermines the simple assumption that fiction doesn’t really happen.
[website]
2007-2008
English 111: First Year Composition (Literature)
So What?: Stakes in Short Fiction
The Expository Writing Program describes English 111 as a "writing course [that] focuses on the production of complex academic arguments that matter on both literary texts and scholarship about literature." By this description, the course has three focal points. The first two are obvious and relate directly to the course title, "Composition: Literature." This is a "writing course," which will emphasize "complex" argumentation-style writing, and the content and subject of this persuasive writing will be literature, or in our case, short fiction. The third focal point of this course, however, is less obvious and tends to get overlooked despite itself. Not only will we be writing arguments about literature, but we will be writing arguments about literature "that matter." To some, this may sound paradoxical; an argument about literature that matters, yeah right. But, since we are in this class, it at least seems a reasonable question to ask, what matters about literature and how can we write about it? In this course, we will put this third focal point to the test. Our central emphasis will be on claims and stakes, the what to say and the why say it. We will read six works of short fiction; we will write several responses, short compositions, and longer papers; we will review and edit each other's work and respond to these critiques with thoughtful revision; and all the while pushing the overwhelming question, "so what?"
[website]
English 200: Reading Literature
Reading Reality, Reading Literature
The intention of this course is to offer techniques and practice reading and enjoying literature. Specifically, we will explore approaches to literature that emphasize what is said in the text itself rather than what it "symbolizes" or its "deeper meaning." To help us, we will read a selection of texts that, just like we will, grapple with the task of interpretation and the stakes of reading as they bear on our experience of reality. Texts will likely include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, James Agee, Mark Danielewski, and Paul Auster. Requirements will include 2, 3-4 page papers, one 4-5 page final paper, occasional short writing tasks, active participation in class and in online discussion groups. This class fulfills both VLPA and W credits.
[website]
English 250: Introduction to American Literature
Against Interpretation: The Task of Reading American Literature.
In “Against Interpretation” Susan Sontag criticizes a style of engaging works of art that “digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” Though polemical at its time of publication in 1964, Sontag’s thesis was not a new one. The history of American literature , in fact, features a tradition of addressing this very “X is really – or, really means –A” style of interpretation. As far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narratives about Puritan society it seems US authors recognized, just as Sontag does, that “interpretation” is a particular problem in America. This class will take up Sontag’s charge and will focus on the theme of interpretation as it appears in US literature from Puritans to the Postmodernists. Surveying major literary works and forms in a basically chronological order, we will attempt to answer the inevitable question, if not interpretation, then what? Due to the nature of our inquiry, participation will be expected regularly and writing assignments will be frequent. Readings will likely include Mather, Edwards, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Stein, Walker and Agee, Pynchon, and Auster. Texts: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Walker and Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famouse Men; Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49; Auster, City of Glass.
[website]
2006-2007
teaching assistant for...
Comparative History of Ideas 205:
Method, Imagination, Inquiry
Examines ideas of method and imagination in a variety of texts, in literature, philosophy, and science. Particularly concerned with intellectual backgrounds and methods of inquiry that have shaped modern Western literature. Acquaintance with major philosophers, writers and theorists for whom the ideas of inquiry, method, and imagination are primary. A principal concern is the manner in which ideas are transmitted historically, to sustain a conversation that may span centuries, even millennia. The reading list is arranged to illustrate this process, where each book raises questions that the next book takes up.
2005-2006
English 282: Composing for the Web
What is so “new” about the internet, anyway? Developed in the late sixties, it ballooned in the early nineties and supposedly burst by decade’s close. Hyperlinking as a writing practice has been around for centuries in the form of the literary allusion, according to some. All the same, the World Wide Web and the hypertext it supports are lumped into the nebulous category entitled “new media.” Shouldn’t we be over it by now? Despite its growing history and every expanding network of nodes, there is something mystical about composing for the web, something utterly unlike writing on the page, something still untapped. Perhaps its capacity to integrate text with video, audio, and visuals. Perhaps it is the ability to make us wander through a garden of interlinked pages. Perhaps it is the universality and freedom of communication. Perhaps it is all this and more. Over the course of 10 weeks, this course will attempt to identify what it is that makes composing for the web unique. By examining contemporary theories of hypertextuality, cyperspace, and the future of the book, we will locate the essential features, capacities, and potentials of internet writing and experiment in hypertext argumentation. We'll discuss such things as relationships between text and images, hypertext linking, and alternative narrative organizations, as well as what these mean for audience and persuasive argument. We will begin the quarter covering the basic grammars used for composing webpages: (X)HTML and CSS, which will be necessary for the final project. Throughout the quarter, we will spend time analyzing existing webpages, ones interesting from an academic or critical standpoint, in terms of their form and content. We'll read a variety of examples of theories of the web and the way writing is changed by this technology by such authors as Janet Murray, George Landow, Umberto Eco, Arthur Kroker, and others. These readings provide a vocabulary for talking about websites, assessing the rhetorical use of such things as "immersion," "participation/agency," "disorientation," etc. Students will be expected to complete several composing assignments over the course of the quarter, refining basic HTML and CSS skills, while using contemporary perspectives on hypertext to make thoughtful webpages that take advantage of the unique possibilities the medium offers. The final project is an individually-authored webpage on a researched topic that reflects an engagement with the concepts covered in the course. As this course is an introduction, no background in html code or any particular programs is required, but some basic familiarity with working in Windows will be helpful.
[website]
2004-2005
English 131: First-Year Composition
Images, Semiotics, and the Politicization of Pictures
We live in a culture dominated by images. From newspapers, to television, to the internet, to cell phone screens, we are constantly inundated by images. Most of the time we don’t even think of it, but every time we look at an image we make an interpretation of that image based on its context and content. As a result, images are having an increasing influence on our understanding of the world, our place in it in relation to otehrs, and our subsequent behavior. Images are now as important for understanding our role in society as written language. Or even, following John Berger, because “seeing comes before words," they maybe the most important form of cultural production today. For this reason, we will spend the next 10 weeks discussing how placing images in different contexts affects such crucial subjects as identity formation, class hierarchies, cultural difference, social control, and even art appreciation. Following this line of inquiry, we will question images we see everyday and discuss their meaning and significance in a larger social context. English 131 is an introductory writing course designed to acclimate students to the rigors of academic writing. A list of course outcomes, selected by the Expository Writing Program as the standards for successful writing in the academic context, will guide out study. By the end of this course, we will be able to demonstrate each of these outcomes and traits. Each assignment provides practice executing specific outcomes, while major papers, longer works will give us the opportunity to showcase all of our writing skills. This is not a grammar class. We will be expected to explore, analyze, and contextualize a variety of texts within a larger dialogue as we prepare academically rigorous, rhetorically appropriate, and grammatically sound compositions that work in this context. In the process, we will be come stronger, more versatile critical readers, critical thinkers, and critical writers.
[website]