Results for MLA

Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. First of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA curriculum.

Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. Second of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA curriculum.

Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. First of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA curriculum.

Limited to and required of second-year MLA students. Historical, literary, artistic, medical, and theological issues are covered. Focus is on skills and information needed to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing a critical, argumentative graduate paper; conducting library research; expectations of seminar participation.

This course is designed to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how historians think about various kinds of evidence. The past isn't made just off documents, but of all kinds of messy evidence that we need to think about carefully in order to make sound historical arguments. This class focuses on 3 areas that present interesting challenges: material culture (i.e., "things"); slaves and slavery; and environmental and disease history. In each class session, we'll think about the argument that each author is making about their evidence, and also challenge ourselves by looking at some primary sources together. Students should be prepared to tell the class what the argument of the author is for each secondary source reading, and what they think works and doesn't work about their argument. What would you do differently? What methods could you incorporate into your own MLA research, including your thesis? What is the argument of the author?

This is a crash course in film analysis, intended to introduce students both to the key elements of film language (mise-en-scene, editing, cinematography, etc.) and to the socio-cultural and political functions of cinema. Emphasis will be placed on methods of close reading of film style and form, and dynamic intersections of aesthetic and ideological concerns in the register of the moving image. Narrative, documentary, and experimental films from around the world will be screened and discussed in class.

This course is a survey of economic perspectives on issues of life and death. The central idea of economics is that scarcity and constraints are unavoidable facts of life. While economists traditionally focus on the role of scarcity in decisions that people make about work, saving, and spending (among other topics), the role of scarcity extends to a much broader range of decisions, including to fundamental decisions about health, life, and death. The analytic framework of economics helps to explain many puzzling facts about life and death decisions. In this course, we will apply this framework to a diverse set of topics, including the value of life, behavior under uncertainty, rationing healthcare, COVID-19, errors in medical training, smoking, and obesity. Though the language of the economics literature is often very mathematical, no mathematical sophistication is necessary to do well in the course.

Eighteenth-century America was like a laboratory for exciting new political, religious, scientific, and artistic theories that we collectively call "the Enlightenment." But to what extent were the major ideas and questions of the Enlightenment shaped by the specific conditions of North America? Was the new world of America fundamentally different or the same as Europe, and did animals, plants, and peoples improve or worsen there? Could a perfect new society and government, uncorrupted by European problems, be created in America? To what extent did the American Enlightenment lay the groundwork for modern American society and its ideal of continual improvement and progress? We will attempt to answer these questions in this class through short lectures, readings in original documents from the era, and in discussions together.

Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries the republic of Venice created a powerful empire that controlled much of the Mediterranean. Situated on the shifting boundary between East and West, the Venetians established a thriving merchant republic that allowed many social groups, religions, and ethnicities to coexist within its borders. This seminar explores some of the essential features of Venetian society, as a microcosm of early modern European society. We will examine the relationship between center and periphery, order and disorder, orthodoxy and heresy as well as the role of politics, art, and culture in Venice. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of the decline of Venice as a political and economic power and its reinvention as a tourist site and living museum for the modern era.

The human predicament is in many ways tragic¿or so argues the pessimistic South African philosopher David Benatar in his new book by that title. We are beset by pain and evil and we can eke out order and meaning only with sustained effort. In this class we will study three masterpieces in some detail: Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667), Gulliver¿s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, and Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872). These three works take up the human predicament (¿all our woe¿ as Milton famously calls it) in diverse forms: political, social, physical, psychological, financial, marital, domestic. They are astonishing works that more than repay intense close study. We will take these great works on their own terms, first, and then in relation to the great questions of suffering, joy, redemption, and transcendence that they offer. Participants in the class are asked to read David Benatar¿s The Human Predicament before the first class meeting.

What lies beyond the ruins of an ancient city? How did Rome revive? The history of Rome from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance to the age of the Grand Tour. Topics include: the history of the papacy; the everyday world of Roman citizens; the relationship between the city and the surrounding countryside; the material transformation of Rome and projects to map the city; and its meaning for foreigners.

Dante Alighieri has had a profound influence on literary tradition. Among his more active respondents were the poets. While the Romantic poets found inspiration in his blend of lyric and epic, of romance and dream vision, of allegorical pilgrimage and spiritual autobiography, pre-Raphaelite poets such as Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (named after the Italian national poet) explored his use of gender dynamics, poetic authority, and the obsessive nature of love poetry. T.S. Eliot was, as always, a mixed bag, and at the same time as he was critical of a poet like William Blake, who illustrated all of The Divine Comedy and who was in his illuminated poetry in the visionary Dantean tradition of world-making, used The Inferno as the basis for his own deep psychological explorations in poems like ¿The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.¿ Prophetic poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats found themselves turning to Dante in their own dying attempts at epic, those masterful fragments The Triumph of Life and The Fall of Hyperion, respectively. This course will explore the lasting legacy of Dante as a poet of melancholy, alienation, and redemption in the visual and verbal artwork he inspired.

In a world of touchscreens and instant knowledge, going on a journey for the good of the soul might seem strange. But pilgrimage¿spiritual travel¿has witnessed a huge resurgence. Why? We¿ll investigate the pilgrimage through its long history, studying routes to some of the world¿s most sacred places to consider this fundamental form of spiritual and personal expression. From Rome and Mecca, to Japan and Tibet, to Wales and California, these often-spectacular routes inspire, test, and reward travelers. Who travels on these routes and how do they travel? Who and what guides travelers on their way? What motivates these journeys and how did travelers access the spaces they desired to see? What objects testify to pilgrimage and the desire for salvation and remembrance? Indeed, what happens once we get to where we¿re going? Working with personal accounts and with texts on cultural heritage, walking, pilgrimage, spirituality and individual growth, we shall emphasize these questions as we study some of the most well-trodden paths and most famous places in global history.

What are the most pressing and challenging issues facing Americans today? Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and experience "the good life"? How does a soldier in Afghanistan¿s Korengal Valley (TRIBE/War), by Sebastian Junger) Valley come to experience friendship, kinship and masculinity? How does an African American researcher¿s experience living in a ¿Whitopia¿ (Searching for Whitopia, by Rich Benjamin) change his preconceptions about race and class? How does modern agribusiness (Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook) draw immigrants from around the globe and how do we deal with these invisible populations? In ¿Tattoos on the Heart¿ by Father Greg Boyle we learn how a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles is literally turning lives around through compassion, business savvy and community engagement. What creative responses are generated to these problems by normal everyday people such as yourselves? This class uses the methods and modes of ethnographic study in an examination of American culture. Each of these narratives provides a window into the various ways in which Americans approach the subjects of wealth and the good life, poverty and the underclass, and the construction of class, race, and gender in American society. Students will not be required to have any previous knowledge, just curiosity and an open mind.

Opera has been called 'A Song of Love and Death,' and most plots feature love forbidden by family, rivals, or social rules. This seminar will study five operas from the Romantic era in which star-crossed love is not merely forbidden but impossible due to illness, psychology, divine law, or the boundary between humans and non-humans. In addition to being gorgeous in itself, each work represents a different language and national style and a stage in the development of opera across 19th-century Europe. We will see how opera responded to currents in literary romanticism, folklorism, national consciousness, and symphonic music. Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata (1853)Jules Massenet, Manon (1884)Richard Wagner, Die Walküre (1870)Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin (1879)Antonin Dvorak, Rusalka (1901)We will study the five works closely, spending about two weeks on each, and read scholarly interpretations from musical, literary, political, and socio-historical perspectives. You will learn to recognize the building blocks of Romantic opera: solo showpieces, introspective soliloquies, love duets, trios and quartets of intrigue, grand and festive choruses, ballets, and of course death scenes. We will compare multiple stagings of certain scenes to see how decisions of directors and performers can transform the meaning of the drama and music. All works will be studied in translation and on video with subtitles. No prior musical knowledge is required.

This course focuses on the Ottoman Empire, its transformation, collapse, and the emergence of the Republic of Turkey. In the first half of the class, we will discuss the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the Ottoman world, spread over three continents, as well as several themes such statecraft, public life, art and architecture, music, family, and sexuality. Then we will discuss how this imperial order collapsed because of complex global and regional developments. In the second half we will focus on emergence and transformation of Modern Turkey in the 20th century and visit themes such as secularism and Islam, Turkey's relations with Europe, the USA, NATO and the Middle East, ideological movements such as nationalism, liberalism and socialism, as well as the recent crisis of Turkish democracy.

The tiny, remote islands of Galápagos have played a big, central role in the study of evolution. Not surprisingly, they have also been important to the study of conservation. The fascinating adaptations of organisms to the isolated ecosystems of the islands have left them particularly vulnerable as the outside world has come crashing in to the archipelago. Drawing on lessons learned from Darwin's time to the present, this seminar explores evolution, conservation, and their connection among the organisms of this remote Pacific outpost. Using case-study material on finches, iguanas, tortoises, boobies, cacti, Scalesia plants and more, we will explore current theory and debate about adaptation, sexual selection, speciation, adaptive radiation, and other topics in evolution. Similarly, we will explore the special challenges Galápagos poses today for conservation, owing to both its unusual biota and the increasing human impact on the archipelago.

What does it feel like to live on the edge, facing an expanse between you and the next place? Who has lived on the Western fringes of Britain and America? Who has named, formed, and been inspired by that land? Whose voices are silenced in the (re)making of a place? Shaping the landscape through the words we use or the features we build and imagine is as old as recorded time. In this course, we'll investigate how the land is conceived, defined, settled, and delimited through history and literature, with particular reference to Wales and California. We'll focus on specific elements in the landscape, Water, Hill, Tree, Stone, and Border, looking at a sequence of locations through historical, archaeological, placename, literary, and artistic analyses. Students will produce close readings of literary descriptions of landscape, and will read indigenous writers' work alongside those of settlers and colonisers. Among the authors studied will be John Muir, John Steinbeck, Beth Piatote, Linda Noel, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Gwyneth Lewis.

This course interrogates what people mean when they talk about security. Security justifies inconveniences like passwords that are nearly impossible to memorize, and metal detectors to enter sporting events, political talks, and airports. Security is said to be central to processes leading to war: the pursuit of security by one state may imperil the security of another, leading to a spiral of conflict that international relations scholars call "the security dilemma." Sometimes we are asked to ignore impolite, nasty, or thoughtless behavior because someone suffers from the absence of security. Yet despite its importance and centrality in social and political life, security suffers from vagueness and imprecision. It can connote freedom from fear, or freedom from threat. Security's modifiers are abundant and suggest a wealth of objects to be secured; a non-exhaustive list includes human, social, national, international, nuclear, cyber, food, economic, energy, and homeland. In this course we will investigate how the meanings of security have shifted throughout history. We will ask why security becomes a societal preoccupation at different times in history. We will ask whether our current preoccupation with security will be permanent.

Animals have always appealed to the human imagination. This course provides basic a rubric for analyzing a variety of animal poems in order (1) to make you better readers of poetry and (2) to examine some of the most pressing philosophical questions that have been raised in the growing field of animal studies. The animals that concern us here are not allegorical, the serpent as evil, the fox as cunning, the dove as a figure for love. Rather, they are creatures that, in their stubborn animality, provoke the imagination of the poet. On the theoretical side of things, we will examine: the concept of the autobiographical animal defined here as a creature that provides the poet with an opportunity for self-reflection; the ontology of nonhuman animals that remain 'other' and opaque to the questioning, curious human; the nature of animal aesthetics that emerge in creaturely poems; the nature of pathos and sympathy in the relation between humans and nonhuman animals; the ethics of animality; the 'rights of brutes' (animal rights), and transhumanism. Our goals will be: (1) To become a better reader of poetry; (2) to develop a critical skill set regarding the representation of animals; (3) to enjoy engaging in dynamic group discussion about ethic, aesthetic, and philosophical questions and issues.

This seminar aims to introduce students to the complexities of the primary source in its broadest sense, focusing principally on the written word, on images, and on material remains from 1000CE to the present day. We shall investigate how meaning is formed by text in its various physical and historical contexts. Among the major themes that we shall analyse is textual mouvance or variance (how texts change over time at the hands of successive users, whether annotators, readers, performers, editors, translators, or copyists); how paratextual features, such as illustration, typography, codicology and layout both affect and effect our interpretation; and the ways in which meaning can be said to derive from combinations of textual production, reception, and ideological or performative interactions. This course will involve hands-on experience with original sources, and will examine key scholarly approaches to material history.

This is a service based, field oriented, Integrative Learning course. California supported the greatest population density of Native people in all of North America, and was one of the world's most diverse linguistic regions. This class will review the history of California Indian scholarship, the ways in which anthropological and archaeological theory impacted native communities in California, the early exploration and history of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the struggle for sovereignty by Bay Area and other California native communities. The course will involve examination of primary historical documents located in archives in the San Francisco Bay Area, visits to local museums, working with descendent communities, and involvement with local archaeological sites and materials. Depending upon the size the class this course will have a heavy component of field trips, and field work. One of the primary goals of the class is to expose students to the methods materials and techniques that anthropologists, historians and archaeologists use to understand contemporary Indian communities. We will be working with Muwekma leaders to accomplish collaborative and service-oriented projects. Lab and field trip days: This course is intended to be a hands-on, experiential learning experience. We will complete the requirements for the course in a short two- week period. The most important attendance will be on weekends- Saturday and Sunday at a site in the foothills above Stanford, on Midpeninsula open space lands. This means that you will need to have transportation to the field site and engage in archaeological survey and excavation. These are outside- outdoors fieldwork days. It will require some degree of physical activity but we have opportunities for otherly-able bodied people.

The course explores the separate histories and cultures of Ukraine and Russia -- from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries -- and concludes by analyzing nationalist discourse on both sides in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and Russia's imperial governance of Ukraine through mid-nineteenth century. Class will consist of lectures and discussion of readings, which will include extensive primary sources.

Cartography is one of the main devices through which humans have attempted to capture and understand complex social, economic and political phenomena. Map-making in Latin America was one of the most important processes of discovery and appropriation during the colonial period, as the Spanish and Portuguese (as well as the Dutch, French and English if we include the Caribbean islands) used mapping for practical uses related initially to navigation, and as a means of control and extraction of resources from their empires. Indigenous map making was used by the original peoples of the Americas as a form of resistance and a device for adaptation. This course uses mapping in colonial and early independent Latin America as a lens through which students may learn about the process of colonization, state building, and the legacies on those processes on poverty and underdevelopment today.

When you go to Walden Pond these days, you inevitably find yourself walking the trails with hundreds of pilgrims from around the world: Brazil, France, Korea, China, Turkey . . . Thoreau has long been one of our country's secular saints, and not just for one reason. He was way ahead of his time, and publicly outspoken, on issues like abolition (his mother and sister were conductors on the Underground Railroad), education for children, women's rights, Indian rights, what we today call 'ecology' and environmental protection. He was one of the first to translate Buddhist and Hindu texts for American readers, and was an early experimenter in a range of spiritual exercises: voluntary simplicity, self-relinquishment, contemplative solitude, and what is called 'extrospection' (seeing through others' eyes, including other species and what are often assumed to be inanimate objects like rocks and trees). He was also a startlingly accomplished naturalist, one of Alexander von Humboldt's most astute students, and one of the first readers to understand the earthquake-impact of Darwin. William Blake once wrote, "When the doors of perception are open, we will see things as they are, infinite." Every afternoon, Thoreau walked out, with his doors wide open, a receptive and non-judgmental seer, and the next morning he wrote it all down in his Journal, the astonishingly gorgeous life-long record of his being in the world (of which we'll read two edited versions). In the seminar, we will immerse ourselves in Thoreau, but will also recruit a small band of philosophers and artists to help with our explorations (Constable, Ruskin, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, Van Gogh, Frederic Edwin Church, James Turrell, John Cage, Annie Dillard, William James, Aldous Huxley, and of course, Thoreau's lifelong companion, Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Widely dispersed narratives by and about enslaved persons are the focus of this course. We'll seek different ways to understand the concept of `slave narrative' by comparing enslaved pasts via texts from the ancient Mediterranean, the Cape of Good Hope, and the United States. We'll juxtapose famous autobiographies with less familiar material such as the micronarratives that can be reconstructed from court cases. Guiding questions include: What are the affordances, what are the limits of narrative as a source of insight into enslaved pasts? What notions of enslaved experience emerge? How different do such experiences seem when compared across time and space?

Love¿requited and unrequited, faithful and false, heterosexual and same-sex¿was a topic that obsessed Shakespeare throughout his career. Fluid, ever changing, fresh and quick, love has always been the stuff of imagination: who can define it? We¿ll see Shakespeare tackling the subject in various ways in his sonnets and a selection of his plays. Our focus will be on the poetry, both dramatic and lyric (sonnets), with the goal of becoming not only more sophisticated literary interpreters, but confident readers of poetry, familiar with its various techniques for conveying and pursuing the complex nuances of emotion, sexuality, and identity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform society in a way that has not been seen before. AI can bring many positive benefits, such as allowing ideas to more flexibly cross language barriers, improve medical outcomes, and enhance the safety and efficiency of our transportation systems. However, as with the introduction with other technologies, there is the potential of negative consequences, such as job insecurity and the introduction of vulnerabilities that come with greater levels of automation. We will delve deeply into the core issues at stake that come with the greater integration of AI into society.

This graduate colloquium explores gender and sexuality in China during the last few centuries through a survey of scholarship in history and anthropology. Our focus is the Ming-Qing, Republican, and Maoist eras. Readings have been selected to introduce the work of major scholars and basic issues and debates in this field. Our topic is historical, but the course as a whole explores questions fundamental to gender studies more generally. How have culture and history shaped the categories of ¿woman¿ and ¿man¿? How have class, status, and divisions of labor influenced the shaping of normative gender roles and sexualities, as well as actual patterns of behavior? How has gender performance interacted with bodily disciplines and constraints (e.g., reproductive and cosmetic technologies)? How has the modern transformation played out across different societies, and how has the construction of normalcy/deviance changed over time? Is the experience of Euro-American women relevant to women in other parts of the world? What roles have women and ¿the woman question¿ played in revolution? By what standards should liberation be defined, and how can it be achieved?

Course Description TBA

This class will combine classic critical essays in the history of photography with close analyses of particular artists' work. Readings from Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Deborah Willis, Peggy Phelan, Hilton Als, and Fred Ritchin (among others) will guide our approach to fundamental issues in the conjunction of photography and performance. While our main emphasis will be on photographic portraiture and performances such as fashion shoots and selfies, we will also look at how photography performs in a diverse range of settings from criminal trials to sports events. As photography moves from high art to documentary evidence, to a node in an information network to a practice of everyday life, how does it help and hinder the political and philosophical belief in a singular self and a "once in a life-time event"? We will be discussing the photographs of: Matthew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Sherry Levine, Diane Arbus, Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Andy Warhol, Emily Mann, Richard Avedon, Francesca Woodman, Ansel Adams, and Gordon Parks, among others.

The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as food, disease, and heritage. The course studies the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Classes will initially take a longitudinal perspective, looking at the major changes over time to have impacted communities in the Indian Ocean. The course will then explore key topics: maritime endeavor, food, and labor, with particular emphasis on the colonial period and influence of Europeanization. Throughout the course, stress is placed on how archaeo-historic datasets can inform our understanding; however, the course will also be enriched through the inclusion of evidence and perspectives from anthropology and art.

This course is designed to put literary, psychoanalytic, sociological, architectural, post-structural, and queer theory as well as philosophical and art historical writings in conversation with poetry, narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, and film, in order to develop a critical skill set designed not only to address such questions but, more critically for an active mind, to posit new ones.

This MLA course introduces students to the history of law in imperial China through a close reading of primary sources in English translation and highlights of the best relevant scholarship. We begin with the Confucian and Legalist classics and the formation of law in early China. Then we explore how law served as a field of interaction between state and society during China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911). Specific topics include the formation and function of imperial legal codes; autocracy and political crime; evidence, review, and appeals; the regulation of gender and sexual relations; the functioning of local courts; property and contract; the informal sphere of community regulation outside the official judicial system; and law in cultural context, as seen in religious practices and popular fiction. There are no prerequisites for this class: prior knowledge of Chinese history and/or language are welcome but not expected or required.

Commercial companies, government agencies, NGOs, and academics routinely rely on surveys to guide their work. Poor quality surveys have been proliferating in recent years and creating the misleading impression that surveys are routinely inaccurate. But in fact, high quality surveys continue to precisely forecast election outcomes and measure many other phenomena more accurately and quickly and efficiently than lots of other approaches.But to achieve that accuracy, a researcher needs to know what scientists have learned over decades about how to draw truly representative samples from well-defined populations, how to hire and train interviewers to carry out their work objectively and effectively, how to write questions that are easy for respondents to interpret and answer and don't cause bias, how to properly analyze data with weights, and much more. During this course, students will review the evidence documenting accuracy and inaccuracy in survey measurements, guidelines for best practices in collecting survey data, and optimal approaches to analyzing and interpreting survey evidence. In addition, we'll look at in-depth stories of the findings and controversies surrounding surveys of opinions on global warming, surveys assessing the impact of massive chemical spills on the public, surveys assessing the frequency with which safety-endangering things happen during flights of commercial passenger aircraft, and more. This course will help students to be smarter users of survey data, will help to differentiate good surveys from unreliable ones, and will illuminate the roles that surveys play in society today.

John Muir (1838-1914) was a prophetic defender of wild nature, and an internationally celebrated champion of environmental preservation. Known as "The Father of the National Parks" and the Founding President of the Sierra Club, he was a powerful political and cultural force; he was also a mesmerizing story-teller, speaker, and writer. This seminar will focus on Muir's most exuberant and rhapsodic writing, all about the place he loved most in the world, California's Sierra Nevada mountains -- what he called "The Range of Light." We'll start with two autobiographical texts that explain how the Scottish immigrant Muir became "John of the Mountains." We'll spread our view to bring in contemporaries and near-contemporaries whom he admired ? Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Robert Burns, and John Ruskin ? and we'll look at the painters and photographers who were drawn to the Sierras with him: Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, William Keith, Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Finally, we'll spend time with some of the writers and artists who were profoundly influenced by Muir's work -- Everett Ruess, Ansel Adams, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Tom Kilion, and Kim Stanley Robinson ? and we'll read the prize-winning biography by Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.

The third decade of the new millennium appears as a point of intersection of multiple crises of global scale, from climate change, to planetary migrations, to information technologies escaping human control, to unprecedented wealth inequalities. Yet, the feeling of anxiety that all of these and many other crises evoke is not new. Unlike the apocalyptic moods of the past, this new sense of anxiety was based on a realization that humanity has acquired the capacity to self-destruct, which was evidenced with the detonation of the atom bomb and the dawning of the nuclear age. One of the most effective artistic responses to this unprecedented human condition was the new form of theater that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War: the theater of the absurd. This class will explore the unique artistic strategies that absurdist theater devised in response to a variety of overwhelming crises, with the ultimate goal of bringing its lessons into the present. This exploration is not limited to dramatic literature only. We will engage with philosophical texts from authors such as Albert Camus and Karl Jaspers, who provided theoretical grounds for the modern idea of the absurd, with critics such as Martin Esslin and Jan Kott, who recognized this new dramatic paradigm and elaborated on it, and with theater-makers such as Peter Brook, Roger Blin, and Pina Bausch, who responded to the unique performance potential of the absurd. Theater of the absurd contributed to the emergence of the first global form of experimental drama. The backbone of the class consists of dramatic works of canonical authors such Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Adrianne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Edward Albee, and others, not as well-known but no less deserving playwrights such as Tewfik al Hakim, Slawomir Mrozek, and Jose Trijana.

Group meetings provide peer critiques, motivations, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.

Students write a 75-100 page thesis that evolves out of work they pursued during their MLA studies.