ENGL 200:
Reading the Passions of Jesus Christ
This class meets in Savery Hall, room 166, Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:30-2:20pm.
ENGL 200 is designed to introduce students to reading as analysis. To that end, we will be developing three fundamental skills: comprehension, contextualization, and interpretation. As part of this development, we will both analyze a variety of literary forms (ie. prose, poetry, and film) and practice writing as a process of articulation. Thematically, this class aims to interrogate the ways in which the figure of Jesus Christ appears in various literatures as a way of exploring the mysteries of divine love and the passions it inspires. The ultimate goal of the class is to use reading as a means to address questions such as: What is the relationship between love and the numinous? In what ways does eroticism inform said relationship? What about the erotic’s inclusion in considerations of divine love inspires controversy? Why? (What constitutes blasphemy in the modern age?) And finally – what role does Jesus Christ play in answering these questions?
Required Materials
Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), directed by Martin Scorsese
Expectations Regarding Class Participation
As mentioned above, reading is a practice. What this means is that, to get better, you will need to actually practice. Therefore, during every class session we will actively work on a variety of analytical skills related to both reading and writing. This means that you need to make every effort to attend all class sessions!
Additionally, it is important to keep up with reading the primary text for the class. Every week –including the first! – you should read at least 50 pages of Dayspring. Following this schedule, you will have finished the book by the end of Week Eight. This will allow you to keep up with the work we will be doing in class and ensure you are prepared to complete your final paper at the end of the term.
Semiregularly, you will be responsible for posting to a public discussion board. These 250-500 word “mini-essays” will provide additional, low-stakes opportunities to practice making the type of small, interpretive claims that larger, more wholistic claims are constructed from.
Finally, there are two major projects: a collective course wiki and the aforementioned final paper. Regarding the wiki: you will be responsible for adding two 750-1,000-word encyclopedic entries to a collective class wiki by the end of Week Four. Developing these entries will help you practice doing the type of contextual research and expository writing necessary when generatively reading literature. Each entry will require at least five sources, all of which must be available in print (we will discuss this requirement more thoroughly in class).
The final paper is a 1,500-2,000-word essay tackling one or more of the course’s guiding questions (as listed in the first paragraph of this syllabus), to be submitted during Finals Week. You may take your essay in a different direction, but you will need to have your proposal approved before doing so. Your essay will focus on at least one, if not both, of the course’s primary texts, cite no less than five additional sources (all of which must be available in print), and include close analysis of at least two different “scenes” from the primary texts.
*Summative feedback regarding discussion board post will be given in class on a weekly basis. Wiki entries will be marked solely as “complete/incomplete.” Rough drafts of the final paper will be given feedback individually.
Final Grades
I hate grades. I think grades are an aberration in education and directly feed into an academic culture of white supremacy and help fulfill capitalism's erosion of humanity. Prof. Juliet Shields summarizes the practical problems with grades very well:
"First, using conventional classroom grading often leads students to think more about acquiring grades than about their writing or learning; to worry more about pleasing a teacher or fooling one than about figuring out what they really want to learn, or how they want to communicate something to someone for some purpose. Lots of research in education, writing studies, and psychology over the last 30 or so years have shown overwhelmingly how the presence of grades in classrooms negatively affect the learning and motivation of students. Grades are not the goal of education. Learning is the goal of education.
Second, conventional grading may cause you to be reluctant to take risks with your writing or ideas. It punishes you for taking risks that don’t pan out, but in fact, taking risks and failing are vital to learning. Grades do not allow us to productively fail. They create conditions that mostly punish failure, not reward it for the learning opportunity it can and should be.
Finally, conventional grading assumes everyone is the same, that every student develops at the same pace and in the same ways, and that variation in skills in a classroom is bad. It also assumes that all students have access to the same resources and doesn’t take account of basic structural inequities."
If you want to dive deeper into the rationale behind this pedagogy, I'd encourage you to read Jesse Stommel's Why I Don't Grade. Asao Inoue has also been deeply influential to me in pointing out the inherent racism in most grading systems and I would be happy to point students to his work as well.
What does this mean practically? Well, the university still requires that I give you grades, so here's what I do:
If you make an honest effort to participate in the class, you'll receive a 4.0
I'm not going to arbitrate here what is and isn't an honest effort. I'm not going to surveil you or try to punish you for doing this or not doing that. I believe that each and every one of you share the innate human desire to learn and grow and delight in being curious. I want to model radical trust in a world that seems preoccupied with the worst versions of ourselves. So, I trust you will do what you have capacity for at this moment in time. I trust you to know your needs and dreams best and will give this class the attention it deserves within that personal schema. I trust that you will strive to live ambitiously. If any issues arise, I trust that we will have a conversation and work through them together. To that end – if I believe your level of participation in the class is lacking to the degree that I no longer feel comfortable passing you in the class, I will initiate at least two points of contact by which we can come to agreement on what is necessary to rectify the situation.
While I have never encountered any serious problems related to this relatively ambivalent attitude towards grades, I will make very clear that I reserve the right to give students whatever final grade I deem appropriate. By choosing to remain enrolled in the class until Finals Week, students are consenting to this arrangement.
Regarding the Use of “AI”
Passing off the bulk of your cognitive effort to a machine system does not align with the overarching goal of this class, which is meant to sharpen and expand your cognition in relation to analytical reading. If you find yourself tempted to pass off the product of a language learning model as your own work because you did not give yourself enough time to think though the course material (a process that, in this setting, necessitates writing), then we should have a conversation about your time management strategies. If you find yourself tempted to pass off the product of a language learning model as your own work because you do not feel as if the assignments I have tasked you with are worth doing, we should have a conversation about why and what adjustments or clarifications might be needed to address that dissatisfaction. Regardless, I will not be approaching your work from a standpoint of paranoid suspicion. Evaluating student writing based on the question of whether or not they actually wrote it is both frustrating and futile, to say nothing of how it sours the relationship between instructor and student. I should be clear, however, that I do not consent to the reception of artificially generated writing. If you decide to ignore this assertion, your violation will not be given notice by me. Walking the Way of the Husk will yield its own consequences in time.
Note on Technology
While we may use personal electronic devices like cell phones and/or laptops in class for specific projects or discussions, such devices should otherwise be off and put away. It is becoming abundantly clear that the general use of these tools in educational settings is detrimental and that they are responsible for a general decline in cognitive skills across society as a whole.
Notetaking should be done with pen and paper unless you have specific accommodation needs.
Note on Subject Matter
This course requires respectful, scholarly engagement with the topics of Christianity as a religious belief/institution and queer sexuality. No substitute reading material or assignments will be given. By choosing to remain enrolled in the class past Week One, students are consenting to the material, assignments, and grading policy as written above.
"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and do more." - Oscar Wilde
Dorian L. Alexander Office Hours: M/W 11:30-12:30 or by appointment
Dorian21@uw.edu Padelford A306/ Zoom Meeting ID - 986 6759 7922
The university mandates the inclusion of the following statement:
“Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy (https://registrar.washington.edu/staffandfaculty/religious-accommodations-policy/). Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form (https://registrar.washington.edu/students/religious-accommodations-request/).”