ENGLISH 1:
History and Theory of Novel Group (DLCL 1)
For undergraduates in English, the DLCL, and East Asian literatures interested in the novel and the events sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Novel (CSN) and to prepare them to attend CSN events with some understanding of the material presented. Each CSN event¿the New Book Events, the Ian Watt Lecture on the History and/or Theory of the Novel, and the Center's annual conference¿will either be preceded or followed by a colloquium, led by a member of the graduate student staff. In these colloquia, students will engage with the material under discussion, usually written by the speaker(s) on whose work the events are based. Participation at 75% of events and colloquia is mandatory for course credit. Precirculated readings will be made available for all colloquia preceding an event, and often for those held after the event, to enable students to develop a familiarity with issues pertaining to the theoretical and historical study of the novel.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 10AX:
Fiction Writing
"Of the many definitions of a story, the simplest may be this: it is a piece of writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens next. Good writers, it is often said, have the ability to make you keep on reading them whether you want to or not-the milk boils over, the subway stop is missed." - Bill Buford, former fiction editor of The New YorkernnnThis course will introduce students to an assortment of short stories by past and contemporary masters, from Ernest Hemingway to ZZ Packer. We will explore the basic elements of fiction writing, including story structure, point of view, dialogue, and exposition, always keeping in mind the overarching goal of trying to get the reader to turn the page in anticipation. Some summer reading and participation in an online blog will prepare us for discussions we'll have together when the class begins. The course will indeed be "intensive," as we will write a complete draft of a short story in the first week and then distribute these stories for feedback sessions in the second week. Along the way, we'll write additional short exercises to stimulate our imaginations and to practice elements of craft. Field trips will include visits to some of the vibrant literary hotspots in San Francisco as well as a conversation with Stephen Elliott, editor of The Rumpus and a writer and member of the Writer's Grotto collective.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 14Q:
"Tis All In Pieces, All Coherence Gone": John Donne, the Neurosciences, and the Early Modern World
John Donne, poet and dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, is one of the most innovative and dramatic poets in literary history. His writing bears the marks of the profound changes that were occurring on the threshold ofnnthe modern world, in such areas as anatomy, astronomy, mathematical perspective, religion, exploration, theatre, art, and concepts of the self. The dramatic realism of his poetry exerted a shaping influence on such modern poets as Browning, Eliot, and Rich; on contemporary composers such as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Benjamin Britten; and on the plays of Samuel Beckett and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright, Margaret Edson. The seminar will situate Donne's work within the vibrant historical and cultural milieu of the early modern world in conjunction with recent "and highly thought-provoking" developments in the neurosciences and the cognitive features of early modern literature, including Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the modern plays of Samuel Beckett.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
ENGLISH 16SI:
Contemporary Children's Literature
Examination of the changing themes tackled by authors addressing a middle-grade (and occasionally young adult) audience beginning in the mid-twentieth century and carrying on through present day. Texts will be read chronologically, alternating between British and American authors, in order to track the fundamental questions, concerns, and triumphs of children¿s literature both over time and between contemporary texts of different cultures. Texts range from the playfully inventive Phantom Tollbooth to the psychologically thrilling Marcelo in the Real World in order to discuss the major developments (as well as the critical constants) of the increasingly significant literary genre of children¿s literature.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1-2
ENGLISH 43:
Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, AMSTUD 143, ENGLISH 143)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143.) African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals, trickster tales, and slave narratives to recent developments such as black feminist theory, postmodern fiction, and hip hop lyricism. We will engage some of the defining debates and phenomena within African American cultural history, including the status of realist aesthetics in black writing; the contested role of literature in black political struggle; the question of diaspora; the problem of intra-racial racism; and the emergence of black internationalism. Attuned to the invariably hybrid nature of this tradition, we will also devote attention to the discourse of the Enlightenment, modernist aesthetics, and the role of Marxism in black political and literary history.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 43A:
American Indian Mythology, Legend, and Lore (ENGLISH 143A, NATIVEAM 143A)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.)Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 46N:
The Hemingway Era
While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Hurston and Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. This course will address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in representing the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 47N:
Sports and Culture
Stanford has the most successful student-athlete program in the country (maybe ever) and athletics are an enormously important aspect of Stanford¿s student culture. This course looks in depth at sports in American culture. Through film, essays, fiction, poetry and other media, we will explore an array of topics including representations of the athlete, violence, beauty, the mass media, ethics, college sports, race and gender.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 50N:
The Literature of Inequality: Have and Have-Nots from the Gilded Age to the Occupy Era (AMSTUD 50N)
Not since the turn of the last century have Americans experienced such a profound gap between those who have and those who do not, between wealthy and working poor, between defacto upper and lower classes, between those of the status quo and those who slip to the social periphery. We will be examining literary and artistic explorations of social and economic inequity, fiction and art that looks at reversals of fortune as well as the possibilities for social change. Readings include Jacob Riis¿ How the Other Half Lives, W.E.B. Du Bois¿ The Souls of Black Folk, Edith Wharton¿s House of Mirth , James Agee & Walker Evans¿ Let Us Not Forget Famous Men , T.C. Boyle¿s The Tortilla Curtain, Julie Otsuka¿s When the Emperor Was Divine and Occupy Movement art.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul
ENGLISH 68N:
Mark Twain and American Culture (AMSTUD 68N)
Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain has been called our Rabelais, our Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. President Franklin D.nnRoosevelt got the phrase New Deal from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Class discussions will focus on how Twain's work illuminates and complicates his society's responses to such issues as race, technology, heredity versus environment, religion, education, and what it means to be American.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 71N:
American Daughters: Hawthorne to Robinson
The American novel is often characterized as a tradition focused on the relationships of men to other men. This is partly because American novels have supplied some of the greatest examples of adventure or road novels in which female characters played minor roles, if any, in the novels' plots. We will examine novels in which daughters figure significantly in order to examine how the representation of daughters has motivated experiments with form and character in the American novel.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 81:
Philosophy and Literature (CLASSGEN 81, COMPLIT 181, FRENCH 181, GERMAN 181, ITALIAN 181, PHIL 81, SLAVIC 181)
Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin. Taught in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 88N:
Graphic Novels Asian American Style (ASNAMST 88N)
Though genre fiction has occasionally been castigated as a lowbrow form only pandering to the uneducated masses, this course reveals how Asian American writers transform the genre to speak to issues of racial difference and social inequality.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 90:
Fiction Writing
The elements of fiction writing: narration, description, and dialogue. Students write complete stories and participate in story workshops. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter).
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Antopol, M. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Quade, K. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Soileau, S. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Boland, E. (GP);
Horack, S. (GP)
ENGLISH 91:
Creative Nonfiction
(Formerly 94A.) Historical and contemporary as a broad genre including travel and nature writing, memoir, biography, journalism, and the personal essay. Students use creative means to express factual content.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors: ;
Antopol, M. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Hummel, M. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Kline, P. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Quade, K. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Soileau, S. (GP)
ENGLISH 92:
Reading and Writing Poetry
Prerequisite: PWR 1. Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 94:
Writing Across Genres
For minors in creative writing. The forms and conventions of the contemporary short story and poem. How form, technique, and content combine to make stories and poems organic. Prerequisite: 90, 91, or 92.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 100A:
Literary History I
First in a three quarter sequence. Team-taught, and ranging in subject matter across almost a millennium from the age of parchment to the age of Facebook, this required sequence of classes is the department's account of the major historical arc traced so far by literature in English. It maps changes and innovations as well as continuities, ideas, and aesthetic forms, providing a grid of knowledge and contexts for other, more specialized classes.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 100B:
Literary History II
Second in a three quarter sequence. Team-taught, and ranging in subject matter across almost a millennium from the age of parchment to the age of Facebook, this required sequence of classes is the department's account of the major historical arc traced so far by literature in English. It maps changes and innovations as well as continuities, ideas as well as aesthetic forms, providing a grid of knowledge and contexts for other, more specialized classes.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 100C:
Literary History III
Third in a three quarter sequence. Team-taught, and ranging in subject matter across almost a millennium from the age of parchment to the age of Facebook, this required sequence of classes is the department's account of the major historical arc traced so far by literature in English. It maps changes and innovations as well as continuities, ideas as well as aesthetic forms, providing a grid of knowledge and contexts for other, more specialized classes.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 105:
The Renaissance: Art, Science, Magic and Love
A survey of English Renaissance literature from Sidney and Spenser to Milton and Marvell, and including Marlowe¿s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare¿s The Tempest. The course gives training in the reading of early modern poetry and prose, and considers what kind of cultural, social and political institution literature was in Renaissance England: who wrote it and why and for whom, what the pressures were on it, what expectations it fulfilled (or on occasion defeated), whose interests it served.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 115A:
Shakespeare and Modern Critical Developments
Approaches include gender studies and feminism, race studies, Shakespeare's geographies in relation to the field of cultural geography, and the importance of religion in the period.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 117A:
Irony: From Socrates to David Foster Wallace
Studies the varieties of literary irony from Plato's dialogues to contemporary fiction. Focus is on questions about what irony is and why writers use it. How does irony go astray? What kinds of topics seem to require irony? How does irony work? Writers include Plato, Chaucer, Swift, Thomas Mann, David Foster Wallace. Class also makes widespread use of contemporary comedy. Requirements will be one short paper, one long paper and an in-class presentation. Satisfies the capstone seminar requirement for the major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 118:
Literature and the Brain (ENGLISH 218, FRENCH 118, FRENCH 318, PSYCH 118F)
Recent developments in and neuroscience and experimental psychology have transformed the way we think about the operations of the brain. What can we learn from this about the nature and function of literary texts? Can innovative ways of speaking affect ways of thinking? Do creative metaphors draw on embodied cognition? Can fictions strengthen our "theory of mind" capabilities? What role does mental imagery play in the appreciation of descriptions? Does (weak) modularity help explain the mechanism and purpose of self-reflexivity? Can the distinctions among types of memory shed light on what narrative works have to offer?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 119F:
British Women Novelists from Aphra Behn to Charlotte Bronte
A chronological reading of works by various pioneering women novelists of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth century. Theoretical and historical questions to be addressed: why were British women writers particularly drawn to the novel genre? What kinds of historical changes and thematic preoccupations do their works reveal?. How sensible--or not--is it to speak of a 'female tradition' in the development of the English Novel?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 121A:
Tattoos, Scars, Marks and American Cultures of Inscription
From Anne Hutchinson to Nathaniel Hawthorne, American writers were drawn to marked, tattooed, and scarred bodies. This course examines how various corporeal inscriptions, real or imagined, have become vehicles of reward and punishment, objects of science, sites of race and gender identities, and vessels of the divine and the unsayable. Considering a wide range of texts, images and movies, we will trace how marks on the very surface of the subject have been read and made meaningful. What is the relationship between body and text? What are the confines of surface and self? How does the body participate in constructions of race, class, and gender?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 123:
American Literature and Culture to 1855 (AMSTUD 150)
A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 132:
Literary Media: From Frankenstein to Facebook
The nineteenth century was a critical period for technological development. Literature changed dramatically as the telegraph replaced the letter and photographs replaced painted illustrations. Through texts such as Keats¿s Letters, Shelley¿s Frankenstein, Carroll¿s Alice in Wonderland, and Stoker¿s Dracula, we will explore the effects of media on the creation, dissemination and reception of literature. This course will also facilitate comparative work by juxtaposing nineteenth-century technologies with our own contemporary literary media such as twitter, tumblr, youtube, and facebook.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 132D:
Suspense and Fear in Literature: Digitally Decoding a Literary Effect
Use of new digital methodologies to explore why certain texts create the feeling of suspense. Does the effect of tension or fear result from just subject matter, or is there a deeper linguistic pattern that creates this experience for readers? Reading includes some of the key works of suspense from the last three centuries: books by Walpole, Poe, Doyle, Collins and Christie along with critical essays that explore their effect on readers. We will also work together to create a new digital model of the lexical and syntactic features of these works to uncover the reoccurring hidden patterns of language that help explain why we are affected by literary suspense. No previous technical experience is necessary.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 132G:
Love in Nineteenth Century Fiction and Poetry
introduction to literature of the 19th century with emphasis on the portrayals of love that pervade it. How 19th century poets and novelists imagined love and how it was shaped for them by genre, geography and gender. Does love redeem? What are the barriers to love? Readings include fiction by Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Wilde, James and Hardy, and poetry by Keats, Browning, Rosetti, Tennyson, and others.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 134:
The Marriage Plot
The marriage plot in British fiction. Novels include Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure and Mrs. Dalloway.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 139B:
American Women Writers, 1850-1920 (AMSTUD 139B)
The ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Last offered: Winter 2012
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 140H:
The Idea of a Theater (TAPS 162I)
Examines the idea of a theater from the religious street theater of Medieval York, though Shakespeare's Globe, and onto the mental theater of the Romantic reader and the alienation effects of Brecht's radical playhouse in the 20th cent
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 142D:
Talking Back: Intertextuality in Contemporary Fiction
Why do so many contemporary writers create fictions that contend with the past by rewriting, revising, or otherwise `talking back¿ to their literary forebears? Is everything intertextual or are post-WW II experiments in intertextuality characteristic of historical, cultural, and geopolitical changes particular to the twentieth century? How does intertextuality inform narrative voice, constructions of authorship, character portrayal, political and aesthetic interpretation, and contemporary claims to¿or critiques of¿ fame and canonization? Students will be encouraged to make comparative connections with the contemporary media scene, while comparing EM Forster and Zadie Smith; Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham; George Orwell and Margaret Atwood; Charotte Bronte and Jean Rhys; Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 143:
Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, AMSTUD 143, ENGLISH 43)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143.) African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals, trickster tales, and slave narratives to recent developments such as black feminist theory, postmodern fiction, and hip hop lyricism. We will engage some of the defining debates and phenomena within African American cultural history, including the status of realist aesthetics in black writing; the contested role of literature in black political struggle; the question of diaspora; the problem of intra-racial racism; and the emergence of black internationalism. Attuned to the invariably hybrid nature of this tradition, we will also devote attention to the discourse of the Enlightenment, modernist aesthetics, and the role of Marxism in black political and literary history.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 143A:
American Indian Mythology, Legend, and Lore (ENGLISH 43A, NATIVEAM 143A)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.)Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 145G:
American Fiction since 1945
A survey of the American novel and short story since WWII focusing on themes of mass media and mass marketing, technology and information, poverty and prosperity, race and ethnicity. Included are works by Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros and others.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 146:
Development of the Short Story: Continuity and Innovation
Exploration of the short story form¿s ongoing evolution as diverse writers address love, death, desire. Maupassant, D.H. Lawrence, Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, Hurston, and others. Required for Creative Writing emphasis. All majors welcome.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 148:
Family Drama: American Plays about Families (TAPS 248)
Plays written by 20th century writers that concentrate on the family as the primary source of dramatic conflict and comedy. Writers include Williams, O'Neill, Wilder, Albee, Vogel, Parks, Lindsay-Abaire, and Hwang.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 151C:
Wastelands
Beginning with a sustained examination of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," this class will explore the trope of ecological and/or spiritual devastation as it enters into other modernist (Hemingway, Cather, Faulkner, O'Neill) and postmodernist (Ballard, Atwood, McCarthy) projects, tracing this theme to its culmination in the contemporary zombie apocalypse.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 151F:
Angelheaded Hipsters: Beat Writers of San Francisco and New York
Reading of central writers of the Beat movement (Ginsberg, Kerouac, di Prima, Snyder, Whalen) as well as some related writers (Creeley, Gunn, Levertov). Issues explored include NY and SF, Buddhism and leftist politics, poetry and jazz. Some exposure to reading poems to jazz accompaniment. Examination of some of the writers and performers growing out of the Beats: Bob Dylan, rock music, especially from San Francisco, and jazz.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 152A:
"Mutually Assured Destruction": American Culture and the Cold War (AMSTUD 152A)
The temperature of the early Cold War years via readings of Soviet and U.S. propaganda; documentary film and film noir; fiction by Bellow, Ellison, O¿Connor, and Mailer; social theory by Arendt, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School; and political texts such as Kennan¿s Sources of Soviet Conduct, the ¿Truman Doctrine¿ speech, and the National Security Council Report 68. Major themes include the discourse of totalitarianism, MacCarthyism, strategies of containment, the nuclear threat, the figure of the ¿outsider¿ and the counterculture, and the cultural shift from sociological to psychological idioms.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 152F:
Doing Race and Ethnicity: How and Why it Matters (CSRE 152F)
Going to school and work, renting an apartment, going to the doctor, watching television, voting, reading, and attending religious services are all activities that involve doing¿consciously or unconsciously¿race and ethnicity. In this course, we draw from history, psychology, genetics, and literary studies to understand contemporary racial formations and cultural representations. Course will include two 50-minute lectures with a required online discussion section. Enrollment capped at 20 students.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 153A:
James Joyce
A close reading of Joyce¿s works, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. We will also read Stephen Hero, the abandoned draft of A Portrait, Giacomo Joyce, several of Joyce¿s speeches, letters and poems, and the play Exiles. We¿ll devote some attention to his biographies, and also watch clippings from the two film versions of Ulysses: Joseph Strick¿s Ulysses:(1967) and Sean Walsh¿s Bloom (2004). We will read some of the classics of Joyce criticism (Wilson, Levin, Lukacs), as well as later, more contemporary approaches (Jameson, Moretti, Duffy, Gibson, Wicke, Latham, Rubenstein, Walkowitz).
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 153J:
Virginia Woolf: Form, Function, Feminism
Who¿s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Once upon a time, it was Woolf¿s feminism that made her a scary cultural commodity. Now, she is the respected grande dame of twentieth-century feminism, author of A Room of One¿s Own (1929), a founding feminist treatise of the last century. But what connects Woolf¿s role as novelist with that of polemicist? Against what cultural canvas was she working? This course will put Woolf¿s feminism in historical context, drawing on a range of writers and rhetorical modes to supplement our study of her novels and essays, and will chart the evolution of her fictional experiments for what they tell us about the intersection of politics and aesthetics in the modernist period.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender
ENGLISH 154:
Mapping the Romantic Imagination
Building a Romantic xenograph: an interactive digital map of the places and geographic spaces that informed the writing of British Romantic poets, essayists, and novelists between 1780 and 1830. Explore the meaning of foreignness in the Romantic period. Why was geographic imagination so resonant for the Romantics? What did they gain through poetic descriptions of foreign people and places? Are there particular subjects or ways of writing that happen in or about particular kinds of places? Answer these questions by supplementing readings and discussions of Romantic literature with digital analyses while creating a new map of the physical and imaginative geographic interests of the Romantic period. Authors include Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas De Quincy, Lord Byron, Anna Barbauld, Ann Radcliff, and William Beckford. No prior technical experience required.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 156:
Whitman and Dickinson
Why are Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892) regarded as the two most important figures among all of America¿s early poets? (The fact that they are would have astonished them both.) This course introduces students to the core themes and key work of these two conspicuously different artists¿ artists whose ambitions and achievements went widely unrecognized in their own day, who never read each other's work, and yet whose divergent, doubled influence on post-1900 American poetry is impossible to underestimate.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 158A:
Literary Celebrity: Douglass, Hemingway, Plath
This course considers the phenomenon of literary celebrity by examining three American authors whose lives and public images transcended their work: Frederick Douglass, the orator and three-time autobiographer whose image was placed on the wall of many nineteenth-century African-American homes; Ernest Hemingway, the Modernist writer whose hyper-masculine reputation has remained powerful in American culture even as his literary star has declined; and Sylvia Plath, the confessional poet and novelist who, with her controversial suicide at age 30, became a figurehead in the emerging women¿s movement. By reading texts from each author, newspaper and magazine coverage, and critical assessments, we will explore how authors¿ texts help create their legends, and how their reputations influence the way we read their work.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 15SC:
Mixed Race in the New Millennium:Â Crossings of Kin, Culture, & Faith in the 21st Century
Recently, a New York Times article identified the vanguard of the future as young, global, and hybrid. The article gave this demographic a name: Generation E.A. (Ethnically Ambiguous). Our course examines the political and aesthetic implications of Generation E.A. We will look at the hot new vogue for "mixed race," examining contemporary images of mixed race as represented in literature, art, performance, film, Internet, and popular culture. Galvanized by the 2000 census with its offer of a "mark one or more" (MOOM) racial option to check, mixed race advocates have acquired legal leverage and national recognition in the last decade. Dozens of organizations, websites, affinity and advocacy groups, modeling and casting agencies, television pilots, magazines, and journals - all focused on the mixed race and cross-cultural experience - have emerged in the last few years. Clearly all these cultural and legal events are changing the way we talk and think not only about race but also crossings and mixings across gender, nation, religion, and socioeconomic experience. Assignments explore the current controversies over mixed race identification and also the expressive and political possibilities for representing complex identities: requirements include three 2 to 3-page analytical writing assignments and an individualized project. (Students can choose from two options for this project: artistic project or written narrative.)
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 160:
Poetry and Poetics
Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 161:
Narrative and Narrative Theory
An introduction to stories and storytelling--that is, to narrative. What is narrative? When is narrative fictional and when non-fictional? How is it done, word by word, sentence by sentence? Must it be in prose? Can it be in pictures? How has storytelling changed over time? Focus on various forms, genres, structures, and characteristics of narrative.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 162:
Critical Methods
Introduction to the different intellectual models which help us explain and interpret literary texts, genres, and movements.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 163A:
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Shakespeare's tragedies occupy a unique place in Western culture. Readings include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and Anthony and Cleopatra, considering the theatrical and non-theatrical sources, staging tradition, historical context, and critical issues such as gender, sexuality, race and class. Plus a look at more recent stagings and adaptations of these plays to see how modern directors are interpreting these works.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 163B:
The Other Shakespeare
Reading and discussion of six less familiar Shakespeare plays: Henry IV Part 1, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter¿s Tale, and The Tempest. Material covered will include dramatic and poetic analysis, cultural and social history, stage history, and performance.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender
ENGLISH 164:
Senior Seminar
Small-class format focused on the close reading of literary texts and analysis of literary criticism. This class answers the questions: How do literary critics do what they do? What styles and gambits make criticism vibrant and powerful? Goal is to examine how one goes about writing a lucid, intelligent, and convincing piece of literary criticism based on original research.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 167B:
Stories of Revenge
Stories of revenge continue to exert their magnetic pull on us, even as vengeance itself is no longer that familiar. What is it about revenge that makes for good story-telling? What questions do stories of revenge raise about justice, society and the individual. How do literary conceptions of revenge evolve over time. Traveling from the realms of religious and legal retribution to those of fantasy, we will think about how such stories are told (what makes for an effective narrative; how protagonists are depicted; what motivates revenge; what makes revenge `successful¿) but we will also think about what these stories are meant to do to us. Do they teach and if so, how? Can stories themselves exact vengeance. Are they part of the process of doing justice?
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 167D:
Crimes and Clues: Detective Fiction
Detective fiction, classic or mass-market paperback, keeps us on the edge of our seats¿we want to know who committed the crime, what the motivation was, and how the detective is going to solve it. In this course, we will think critically about how suspense works by investigating the structures of detective stories, the expectations we have as readers, and the ways in which authors have played with those expectations. How do different works portray crime, and what¿s at stake in seeing it solved and restoring order? Starting with the earliest nineteenth-century forms¿Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle¿we will trace the development of detective fiction up to the present day television franchise Law & Order, and consider how television, journalism, and film have adapted and changed the genre.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 172:
Modern Indian Literature
Engagement with the various vernacular and Anglophone literary traditions of modern India. What is gained, and what is lost for the large and complex phenomenon of modern Indian literature, when its most visible representative, Anglophone fiction, threatens to overshadow the rest and sits easy with the new image of rise and growth that engulfs the nation and its diaspora today? Texts by Dutt, Chatterjee, Tagore, Devi, Premchand, Verma, Sobti, Manto, Murthy, Ambai, Narayan, Rao, Ezekiel, Lal, Ghosh, Rushdie, and others.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
ENGLISH 172D:
Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (ANTHRO 33, CSRE 196C, PSYCH 155, SOC 146, TAPS 165)
How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 172E:
The Literature of the Americas (AMSTUD 142, COMPLIT 142, CSRE 142)
A wide-ranging overview of the literatures of the Americas innncomparative perspective, emphasizing continuities and crises that are common to North American, Central American, and South American literatures as well as the distinctive national and cultural elements of a diverse array of primary works. Topics include the definitions of such concepts as empire and colonialism, the encounters between worldviews of European and indigenous peoples, the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations, slavery, the New World voice, myths of America as paradise or utopia, the coming of modernism, twentieth-century avant-gardes, and distinctive modern episodes--the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magic realism, Noigandres--in unaccustomed conversation with each other.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 173H:
Passions, Emotions, Moods
From Descartes on the passions to Heidegger on moods, from rage and grief in King Lear to love and anxiety in the Hollywood woman's film of the 1940s, this course will examine modern theories and enactments of feeling in literature (and film). This will mean reading broadly across the centuries and also across literary forms and genres organized around specific kinds of feeling: tragedy, melodrama, noir, lyric poetry, science fiction, popular feminist fiction, psychoanalysis. Authors may include: Shakespeare, Donne, Melville, James, Ellison, Plath, Beckett, Stein, Spahr.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 175C:
Natives, Immigrants, and Pioneers: The Culture and Politics of the American Landscape
This course will examine a wide range of American engagements with nature: as a determinant of national character and destiny, as a source of spiritual and moral revitalization, as a battleground for the survival of races and ethnicities, as a molding mechanism of citizenship, as the basis of a national art and culture, and as a resource for exploitation or preservation.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 181:
Development of Literary Essay
Reading and discussion of masters of the essay who have dealt with literature and some of the other arts such as film, music, painting, with attention to varieties of style and approach. Readings will include writers like Montaigne, Addison, Dr. Johnson, Eliot, Blackmur, Winters, Hardwick, Guerard, Watt, Rich, Davenport, Gass, Sobin, Barthes, and Cameron. Emphasis will be on how to read varieties of essays (often on works you have not yet read), and how to write them.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 182S:
Looking North: Canadian Literature
A survey of major contemporary novelists north of the forty-ninth parallel and the literary, historical, linguistic, and political traditions that inform their narrative visions. What makes Canadian literature distinctive? What makes it transnational? Writers include Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart, Michel Tremblay, Joy Kagawa, Carol Shields, and Yann Martel. Topics include postcolonialism, postmodernism, federalism, bilingualism, regionalism, Canadian/American relations, transatlantic relations, gender, race, class, and the North as geo-cultural signifier.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 184B:
Text and Context in Humanities: Oedipus and His Vicissitudes
Tales of Modernity from Sophocles, Freud, Chekhov, Babel, and Woolf. Introduction to cross-disciplinary approach in humanities through foundational texts in the modern tradition. The main focus is on Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), alongside his ancillary writings. Contemporary social thought and historical scholarship provide the context (Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Karl Schorske, John Murray Cuddihy) while works of imaginative literature (Sophocles, Anton Chekhov, Isaac Babel, and Virginia Woolf) illuminate the significance of the Oedipus myth for understanding the inter-generational conflict in antiquity and modernity.
Last offered: Winter 2010
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 184H:
Text Technologies: A History
What technologies have historically been used to record and transmit human experience and cultural memory across time and space? Topics include the study of writing, image, sound, and byte, examining all forms of text employed to communicate and represent thought and ideas. Writers including Eric Gill, Walter Benjamin, Walter Ong and Alberto Manguel will cast light on our work on cave painting, inscription, graffiti, tattoo, and manuscript, print, photographic and digital technologies.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 190:
Intermediate Fiction Writing
May be taken twice for credit. Lottery. Priority to last quarter/year in school, majors in English with Creative Writing emphasis, and Creative Writing minors. Prerequisite: 90 or 91.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190F:
Fiction into Film
Workshop. For screenwriting students. Story craft, structure, and dialogue. Assignments include short scene creation, character development, and a long story. How fictional works are adapted to screenplays, and how each form uses elements of conflict, time, summary, and scene. Priority to seniors and Film Studies majors. Prerequisite: 90.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 190T:
Special Topics in Intermediate Fiction Writing
Focus on a particular topic or process. Work includes aspects of reading short stories and novels, writing at least 30-50 pages of fiction, and responding to peers' work in workshop. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190V:
Reading for Writers
Taught by the Stein Visiting Fiction Writer. Prerequisite: 90.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 191:
Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
Continuation of 91. Workshop. The application of advanced storytelling techniques to fact-based personal narratives, emphasizing organic writing, discovering audience, and publication. Guest lecturers, collaborative writing, and publication of the final project in print, audio, or web formats. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Aut, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 191T:
Special Topics in Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
Workshop. Continuation of 91. Focus is on forms of the essay. Works from across time and nationality for their craft and technique; experimentation with writing exercises. Students read and respond to each other's longer nonfiction projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192:
Intermediate Poetry Writing
May be taken twice. Lottery. Priority to last quarter/year in school, majors in English with Creative Writing emphasis, and Creative Writing minors. Prerequisite: 92.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192T:
Topics in Intermediate Poetry Writing
Generation and discussion of student poems. How to recognize a poem's internal structure; how to seek models for work. Students submit portfolio for group critique. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: ENGLISH 92.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192V:
The Occasions of Poetry
Taught by the Mohr Visiting Poet. Prerequisite: 92.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 194:
Individual Research
See section above on Undergraduate Programs, Opportunities for Advanced Work, Individual Research.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 195D:
Writing 2.0: The Art of the Digital Essay
Contemporary changes in the technologies of writing now allow writers to compose using color, images, sound, video, hyperlinks, and other forms of multimedia. Students in this course will explore examples of a number of what we might call ¿animated¿ essays (by composers like Diana Slattery and Shelley Jackson) and then work to create a major digital essay of their own. No special expertise needed: just curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 195W:
Writing Center Peer Tutor Seminar (PWR 195)
For students selected to serve as peer writing tutors in the Stanford Writing Center and/or at other campus sites. Readings on and reflection about writing processes, the dynamics of writing and tutoring situations, tutoring techniques, learning styles, diversity, and ethics. Observation of tutoring sessions, written responses to readings, and other written work.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 196A:
Honors Seminar: Critical Approaches to Literature
Overview of literary-critical methodologies, with a practical emphasis shaped by participants' current honors projects. Restricted to students in the English Honors Program. Offered in conjunction with ENGLISH 196B. Honors Writing Workshop.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 196B:
Honors Essay Workshop
Required of English honors students.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 197:
Seniors Honors Essay
In two quarters.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 198:
Individual Work
Undergraduates who wish to study a subject or area not covered by regular courses may, with consent, enroll for individual work under the supervision of a member of the department. 198 may not be used to fulfill departmental area or elective requirements without consent. Group seminars are not appropriate for 198.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Antopol, M. (PI);
Boland, E. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hummel, M. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Kline, P. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Michas-Martin, S. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Quade, K. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Rovee, C. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Shloss, C. (PI);
Soileau, S. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Wolff, T. (PI);
Wrenn, G. (PI)
ENGLISH 198L:
Individual Work: Levinthal Tutorial
Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in poetry, fiction, and if available, nonfiction. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Prerequisites: 90, 91, or 92; submitted manuscript.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 199:
Senior Independent Essay
Open, with department approval, to seniors majoring in non-Honors English who wish to work throughout the year on a 10,000 word critical or scholarly essay. Applicants submit a sample of their expository prose, proposed topic, and bibliography to the Director of Undergraduate Studies before preregistration in May of the junior year. Each student accepted is responsible for finding a department faculty adviser. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 201:
The Bible and Literature
Differences in translations of the Bible into English. Recognizing and interpreting biblical allusion in texts from the medieval to modern periods. Readings from the Bible and from British, Canadian, American, and African American, and African literature in English.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 202:
History of the Book
Taught in the Department of Special Collections, the course examines the book as both a developing concept and as a material object, from scroll to codex, from manuscript to print, from cold type to electronic medium. Basic bibliographical and paleographical techniques will be taught, and readings in history and theory will be discussed. Attention will focus particularly on the use of books, and hence on the history of reading practices, including marginalia and other marks of ownership. Students will be expected to develop their own projects from among the riches of Stanford¿s rare book collection. The final project may be a collaborative one, with contributions by the class as a whole. This has typically been the preparation of an edition of a manuscript or piece of ephemera in Stanford¿s collection.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 209:
Paleography of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts (CLASSGEN 311, DLCL 209, HISTORY 309G, RELIGST 204)
Introductory course in the history of writing and of the book, from the late antique period until the advent of printing. Opportunity to learn to read and interpret medieval manuscripts through hands-on examination of original materials in Special Collections of Stanford Libraries as well as through digital images. Offers critical training in the reading of manuscripts for students from departments as diverse as Classics, History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, English, and the Division of Languages Cultures and Literatures.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 218:
Literature and the Brain (ENGLISH 118, FRENCH 118, FRENCH 318, PSYCH 118F)
Recent developments in and neuroscience and experimental psychology have transformed the way we think about the operations of the brain. What can we learn from this about the nature and function of literary texts? Can innovative ways of speaking affect ways of thinking? Do creative metaphors draw on embodied cognition? Can fictions strengthen our "theory of mind" capabilities? What role does mental imagery play in the appreciation of descriptions? Does (weak) modularity help explain the mechanism and purpose of self-reflexivity? Can the distinctions among types of memory shed light on what narrative works have to offer?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 261B:
East Goes West: Transnational Asia/Pacific Spatial Geographies (AMSTUD 261B, ASNAMST 261B)
East goes west as a metaphor to invoke the conceptions of fantasy and desire that play out in transnational scope. What attracts diasporic Asian/American subjects to the locations that they travel to, whether it be an identified homeland with which a character attaches a strong affinity, or to a new country where the promise of economic possibilities await?
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul
ENGLISH 261C:
Globalization and Contemporary Fiction
The globalization of the novel in English in the second half of the 20th century; the relationship of the Anglophone novel from the global south with metropolitan aesthetic practices such as those of modernism and postmodernism, and with Western and indigenous narrative theories; the politics of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, and globalization as refracted in the novel as a genre. Texts by Rhys, Naipaul, Tutuola, Achebe, Rushdie, Okrie, Carey, Coetzee, Gordimer, and Ihimaera.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-GlobalCom
ENGLISH 262F:
Transnational American Studies (AMSTUD 262F, ENGLISH 362F)
Exploration of the transnational turn in American Studies, focusing on how transnational perspectives enrich and complicate our understanding of American literature, history and the arts. Readings include recent work in transnational American Studies. Topics include experiments with ways of using digital technology to allow archival materials in different locations to be in conversation with each other.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 290:
Advanced Fiction Writing
Workshop critique of original short stories or novel. Prerequisites: manuscript, consent of instructor, and 190-level fiction workshop.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 291:
Advanced Creative Nonfiction
Continuation of 191. Workshop. The application of advanced storytelling techniques to fact-based personal narratives, emphasizing organic writing, discovering audience, and publication. Guest lecturers, collaborative writing, and publication of the final project in print, audio, or web formats. Prerequisite: ENGLISH 191.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 292:
Advanced Poetry Writing
Focus is on generation and discussion of student poems, and seeking published models for the work.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 293:
Literary Translation (DLCL 293)
An overview of translation theories and practices over time. The aesthetic, ethical, and political questions raised by the act and art of translation and how these pertain to the translator's tasks. Discussion of particular translation challenges and the decision processes taken to address these issues. Coursework includes assigned theoretical readings, comparative translations, and the undertaking of an individual translation project.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 303:
Experiment and the Novel (COMPLIT 353A)
A double exploration of experiment in the novel from 1750 into the 19th century. Taking off from Zola's "The Experimental Novel," consideration of the novel's aspect as scientific instrument. Taking the idea of experimental fiction in the usual sense of departures from standard practice, consideration of works that seem to break away from techniques of "realism" devised prior to 1750. Possible texts by: Lennox, Sterne, Walpole, Goldsmith, Godwin, Lewis, Shelley, Hogg, Emily Bronte, and Diderot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 314:
Epic and Empire (COMPLIT 320A)
Focus is on Virgil's Aeneid and its influence, tracing the European epic tradition (Ariosto, Tasso, Camoes, Spenser, and Milton) to New World discovery and mercantile expansion in the early modern period.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 334A:
Concepts of Modernity 1: Philosophical Foundations (MTL 334A)
In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant proclaimed his age to be "the genuine age of criticism." He went on to develop the critique of reason, which set the stage for many of the themes and problems that have preoccupied Western thinkers for the last two centuries. This fall quarter course is intended as an introduction to these themes and problems. We begin this course with an examination of Kant's philosophy before approaching a number of texts that extend and further interrogate the critique of reason. In addition to Kant, we will read texts by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lukács, and Heidegger.nnThis course is the first of a two-course sequence. Priority to graduate students in MTL and English. The course will be capped at 12 students.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 334B:
Concepts of Modernity 2: The Study of Culture in the Age of Globalization (COMPLIT 334B, MTL 334B)
A survey of 20th-century theory with focus on the concept of culture and methods of studying it from diverse disciplines including, anthropology, historical sociology, literary and cultural studies. Discussions will emphasize modernization, transmodernization and globalization processes in their relations to culture broadly understood, cultures in their regional, national and diasporic manifestations, and cultures as internally differentiated (high and low culture, subcultures, media cultures).
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 357A:
Precision's Point: Hopkins, Moore, Bishop
Among the three poets (Hopkins, Moore, Bishop) to be considered, only Marianne Moore claimed the title of ¿precisionist,¿ thus linking her to a specifically American branch of cubism. Yet each of these poets offers us extraordinary models by which to investigate the means and ends of poetic precision. With a sustained focus on the prose as well as the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and two of her most important literary influences, we will investigate, and historically contextualize, the modes of descriptive and structural precision that each poet offers and resists.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 360A:
The Literature of Posthumanity
An exploration of the theory and literary history of the posthuman, with readings ranging from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to recent works in technology and animal studies.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 362F:
Transnational American Studies (AMSTUD 262F, ENGLISH 262F)
Exploration of the transnational turn in American Studies, focusing on how transnational perspectives enrich and complicate our understanding of American literature, history and the arts. Readings include recent work in transnational American Studies. Topics include experiments with ways of using digital technology to allow archival materials in different locations to be in conversation with each other.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 365D:
American Rebellion: Anne Hutchinson to Thomas Paine
This course will analyze literary, journalistic, sermonic, juridical, and propagandistic documents from the Great Migration to the the Revolutionary War to help us understand how the transition from colonial to national status was accomplished. Our focus will be on the evolution of ¿selfhood¿ or ¿subjectivity¿ and their collective expressions. Categories of selfhood to which we'll attend will include the concepts of sainthood and election; republican and democratic subjectivity; the subject of human rights and the subject of conscience; and the subjective processes of conversion and secularization. The course will provide a thorough survey of the American 17th and 18th centuries.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 369E:
Postcolonial Theory in Motion: from the Bandung Era to the Present
After exploding onto the intellectual scene in the late twentieth century, postcolonial studies appears to have lost momentum in recent years, even fading¿according to its detractors¿into quiet irrelevance. Drawing on foundational and cutting-edge work in postcolonial theory, this seminar asks whether its key insights remain salient for cultural and political analysis in the era of globalization. Readings might include the work of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Leela Gandhi, Achille Mbembe, and others.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 371A:
Early Modern Prose Fiction
A survey of proto-novels and other experimental fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of Renaissance and present-day theories of prose fiction. With some attention to issues of epistemology, politics, and religion, the course charts an episode in European literature that has gone largely unarticulated by critics and historians. Texts include Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., Philip Sidney's two Arcadias, Greene's Pandosto, Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, as well as some influential continental models such as Pantagruel and Don Quixote.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 373A:
Shakespeare from Script to Stage
Consideration of the nature and history of the Shakespearean text from its beginnings, from script and performance to quartos, to the folios, to the multitude of editions, and constantly back to script and performance. What, historically, has constituted a ¿good¿ text of Shakespeare, and what is bad about ¿bad¿ quartos? What have been, historically, the ethics and politics of editing, and what has been the relation of editorial practice to stage practice on the one hand, and to what we want Shakespeare to be on the other? Plays with multiple original texts will be studied, (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear) through the lenses of theatrical history, bibliography and editorial theory.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 377A:
The Art of the Memoir: Autobiographical Writing from 1820 to the Present
Readings in British and American autobiographical writing from the Romantic Age to the Present. Why do people write memoirs? What kinds of rhetorical goals underlie any given memoir? Readings may include autobiographical works by Hazlitt, Henry James, H.D., J.R. Ackerley, Lucy Greevey, Joan Didion, Edmund White, Patti Smith, Daniel Mendelsohn and others.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 384C:
Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence
Topics include Hardy's and Lawrence's views of modernization, urbanization, sexual politics, desire, and the novelistic project. Works studied include Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Augmented by critical readings.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 390:
Graduate Fiction Workshop
For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 392:
Graduate Poetry Workshop
For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 394:
Independent Study
Preparation for first-year Ph.D. qualifying examination.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Majumdar, S. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 395:
Ad Hoc Graduate Seminar
Three or more graduate students who wish in the following quarter to study a subject or an area not covered by regular courses and seminars may plan an informal seminar and approach a member of the department to supervise it.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 396:
Introduction to Graduate Study for Ph.D. Students
Required for first-year graduate students in English. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 396L:
Pedagogy Seminar I (COMPLIT 396L)
Required for first-year Ph.D students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature. Preparation for surviving as teaching assistants in undergraduate literature courses. Focus is on leading discussions and grading papers.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 397A:
Pedagogy Seminar II
Apprenticeship for second-year graduate students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature who teach in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Each student is assigned as an apprentice to an experienced teacher and sits in on classes, conferences, and tutorials, with eventual responsibility for conducting a class, grading papers, and holding conferences. Meetings explore rhetoric, theories and philosophies of composition, and the teaching of writing. Each student designs a syllabus in preparation for teaching PWR 1.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 398:
Research Course
A special subject of investigation under supervision of a member of the department. Thesis work is not registered under this number.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-18
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
Majumdar, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Polhemus, R. (PI);
Putnam, P. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Sohn, S. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 398L:
Literary Lab
Gathering and analyzing data, constructing hypotheses and designing experiments to test them, writing programs [if needed], preparing visuals and texts for articles or conferences. Requires a year-long participation in the activities of the Lab.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 398R:
Revision and Development of a Paper
Students revise and develop a paper under the supervision of a faculty member with a view to possible publication.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 4-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Polhemus, R. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Sohn, S. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 398W:
Orals, Publication and Dissertation Workshop
For third- and fourth-year graduate students in English. Strategies for studying for and passing the oral examination, publishing articles, and for writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 2
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 399:
Thesis
For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisers required.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Polhemus, R. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 122A:
Austen and Woolf
Reading of three novels by Jane Austen¿arguably the most influential and gifted of British female novelists-¿and three novels by Virginia Woolf, whose debt to Austen was immense. Topics include the relationship between women writers and the evolution of the English novel; the extraordinary predominance of the marriage plot in Austen¿s fiction (and the various transformations Woolf works on it); each novelist¿s relationship to the cultural and social milieu in which she wrote.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 261F:
Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature (AMSTUD 261F, ASNAMST 188, FEMST 261F, FEMST 361F)
How writers and representations dialogue, challenge, resist, and complicate such formative constructions of gendered/sexual identities. How queer Asian Americans face ¿multiple negations¿ that include potential expulsion from their own families and from various communities. Authors include Bharati Mukherjee, Russell Leong, Suki Kim, Shawn Wong, Louis Chu, Lawrence Chua, Catherine Liu, Jessica Hagedorn, Timothy Liu, Shani Mootoo, David Mura, among others. Secondary readings will include literary criticism, feminist and queer theory.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 362S:
Trauma Theory, Psychoanalysis and Asian American Literature
How Asian American literature emerges through its relationship to oppression, trauma, and disillusionment. Approaches include critical and theoretical archives including psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and cultural studies. Writers may include Alexander Chee, Fae Myenne Ng, Peter Bacho, Suki Kim, Mohsin Hamid, and le thi diem thuy.
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 396P:
Publication Workshop: The Article
A practical and theoretical study of the genre of the journal article, with critical reflection on its status as a gateway to academic professionalization and as a highly specialized form of public address. We will be reading articles published over the last decade across a diverse range of journals, focusing on issues surrounding methodology, style, tone, and audience. Participants will also work on developing an already polished piece of writing into the form of an article potentially publishable by a peer-reviewed publication. Admission by application in Fall quarter .
| Units: 3-5
