ENGLISH 1:
CSN Undergraduate Colloquium (DLCL 1)
This colloquium is intended for undergraduates who are interested in the history and theory of the novel, and who would like to attend the Center for the Study of the Novel's (CSN) annual conference. Before the conference, students will meet with CSN's graduate student staff, to read and discuss a small number of key texts by participating scholars, whose presentations students will then attend. After the conference, the colloquium will meet again, to discuss both the readings and conference papers, and explore their broader implications for the study of the novel. Attendance at both meetings of the colloquium, and at least one panel at the conference, is required for course credit.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 1D:
Dickens Book Club
Through the academic year, we will read one Dickens novel, one number a week for 19 weeks, as the Victorians would have done as they read the serialized novel over the course of 19 months. The group gets together once a week for an hour and a half to discuss each number, to look carefully at the pattern that the author is weaving, to guess, as the Victorians would have done, what might be coming next, and to investigate the Victorian world Dickens presents. We look carefully at themes, characters, metaphorical patterns, and scenes that form Dickens' literary world, and spend increasing time evaluating the critique that Dickens levels at Victorian life. The weekly gatherings are casual; the discussion is lively and pointed.
Terms: Aut, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 8SI:
Practical Criticism
This course revives a pivotal critical work of the last century, "Practical Criticism" by I.A. Richards, in a seminar that will mirror the conditions of the literary experiment that inspired the book. In the experiment, extremely good and extremely bad poems whose authors range from John Donne and D.H. Lawrence to obscure 20th-century poets were put unsigned before a large and able audience. The comments they wrote at leisure give a stereoscopic view of the poem. We will examine the book, which includes the poems, the scathing anonymous critiques by Richards Cambridge undergraduates, and Richards theory of our psychology of reading.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 9CE:
Creative Expression in Writing
Primary focus on giving students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. Students will come out of the course strengthened in their ability to identify and pursue their own creative interests. For undergrads only.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CT:
Special Topics in Creative Expression
Focus on a particular topic or process of creative expression. Primary focus on giving students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. Students will come out of the course strengthened in their ability to identify and pursue their own creative interests. For undergrads only
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 10A:
Introduction to English I: Medieval and Renaissance Lives
The course traces the development and transformation of key literary concepts and forms from c. 900 to c. 1630. We examine major canonical texts to discover something of the lives of those who wrote and read these works. We shall explore how love and fear may be the key motivations for all human actions.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 10B:
Introduction to English I: Poetics and Politics in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
From the 14th to the 17th centuries, how are literary developments involved with historical events and social conditions? Discussion of how literature works as a force in culture, not only a reflection of other forces. Readings from Chaucer, More, Wyatt, Spenser, Kyd, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and Cavendish.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 11A:
Introduction to English II: From Milton to the Romantics
Major moments in English literary history, from John Milton's Paradise Lost to John Keats's Hyperion. The trajectory involves a variety of literary forms, including Augustan satire, the illuminated poetry of William Blake's handcrafted books, the historical novel invented by Sir Walter Scott, the society novel of Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth's epic of psychological and artistic development. Literary texts will be studied in the context of important cultural influences, among them civil war, religious dissent, revolution, commercialization, colonialism, and industrialization.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 11B:
Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (AMSTUD 150)
(Formerly English 23/123). 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 12A:
Introduction to English III: Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, AMSTUD 12A)
(Formerly English 43/143). In his bold study, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth Warren defines African American literature as a late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century response to the nation's Jim Crow segregated order. But in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement, can critics still speak, coherently, of "African American literature"? And how does this political conception of African American literary production compare with accounts grounded in black language and culture? Taking up Warren's intervention, this course will explore African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals and slave narratives to texts composed at the height of desegregation and decolonization struggles at mid-century and beyond.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 12B:
Introduction to English III: Metamorphoses of Literature 1850-2000
The transformation of literary form and pleasure from Victorian Britain to digital America.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 12SI:
Children's and Young Adult Fiction in the 20th Century
Examination and critical analysis of central themes of children's literature in the past century. From classics such as A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh to the contemporary works of Christopher Paul Curtis, children's literature can tell us an enormous amount about the cultures from which it springs. In this course, we will seek to understand the ideologies guiding children's literature and how they manifest in text.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 15SC:
A New Millennial Mix: The Art & Politics of the "Mixed Race Experience"
Recently, The New York Times and the National Geographic have hailed the "new face of America" as young, global, and hybrid. The NY Times gave this demographic a name: Generation E.A. (Ethnically Ambiguous). Our course examines the political and aesthetic implications of Generation E.A., and the hot new vogue for all things mixed. Galvanized by the 2000 census with its "mark one or more" (MOOM) racial option, dozens of organizations, websites, affinity and advocacy groups, modeling and casting agencies, television pilots, magazines, and journals--all focused on multi-racial/multi-cultural experiences--have emerged in the last few years. We will analyze representations of mixed race and multiculturalism in law, literature, history, art, performance, film, comedy, and popular culture. These cultural and legal events are changing the way we talk and think about race. Importantly, our seminar also broadens this discussion beyond race, exploring how crossings of the color-line so often intersect with other aspects of experience related to gender, religion, culture, or class. Field trips, films, communal lunches, and interactive assignments help us explore the current controversies over mixed-race identification and, more generally, the expressive and political possibilities for representing complex identities. Requirements include three two- to three-page analytical writing assignments, a presentation that can include an optional artistic or media component, and a final group-designed project. If you are a citizen of the 21st century, this class is for and about you.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 16SC:
Learning Theater: From Audience to Critic at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Who doesn't love going to a play: sitting in the darkened theater, an anonymous member of the audience waiting to be entertained, charmed, and challenged? But how many of us know enough about the details of the plays, their interpretation, their production, and acting itself, to allow us to appreciate fully the theatrical experience? In this seminar, we will spend 13 days in Ashland, Oregon, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), where we will attend these plays: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard II, The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night; the world premiere of Lisa Loomer's Roe; Qui Nguyen's Vietgone; William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls' The Wiz (adapted from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz); the world premiere of Penny Metropulos and Linda Alpers' adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, and a world premiere adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard. (To read more about these productions, go to www.osfashland.org). We will also spend time backstage, meeting with actors, designers, and artistic and administrative directors of OSF. Students will read the plays before the seminar begins. In Ashland, they will produce staged readings and design a final paper based on one of the productions. These reviews will be delivered to the group and turned in on Thursday, September 22. n Note: This seminar will convene in Ashland on Monday, September 5, and will adjourn to Stanford on Sunday, September 18. Students must arrive in Ashland by 4:00 p.m. on September 5. Room and board in Ashland and transportation to Stanford will be provided and paid for by the program.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 32N:
Reading Digitally
Exploration of how technology is changing the ways in which we read and think about literature. These changes include the use of text mining, social platforms and the creation of interactive textual platforms. Together, we will discuss these changes in detail as we investigate the new area of study, called, collectively, the ¿Digital Humanities¿ and how this new field is reshaping what it means to read and study literature in the University of the 21st century.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 40N:
Theatrical Wonders from Shakespeare to Mozart
What is the secret of theatrical illusion? How does the theater move us to wonder, sympathetic identification, and reflection? How do the changing stories that theater tells reveal our values? We will ask these questions through a close examination--on the page and on the stage--of dramatic masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderón, and Mozart. We will attend a live performance of The Magic Flute. No prior knowledge of music is required.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
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 48N:
The American Songbook and Love Poetry
A study of performances (Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra etc) of songs by classic American composers (Porter, Rogers and Hart, Cohen).
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 51N:
The Sisters: Poetry & Painting (ARTHIST 160N)
Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 52N:
Mixed-Race Politics and Culture (AFRICAAM 52N, POLISCI 29N)
Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? In this course, we approach issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st century U.S. We will examine issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation and racial prejudice in American society. Topics we will explore include the political and social formation of ¿race¿; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the ¿one-drop rule¿ and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of Census categories and the rise of the Multiracial Movement.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 67:
Contemporary Chicano & Latino Literature (CHILATST 67)
What does it mean to be Chicano and Latino in the United States today? And, how have U.S. writers portrayed the evolution of a Latino identity as it has changed from the age of the Civil Rights Movement to the age of Twitter? This class provides students with an overview of 20th and 21st century U.S. Latino/a literature by focusing on American authors writing after the 1960s to the present. We will read a range of writers, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Héctor Tobar, and Junot Díaz, and examine how these authors grapple with the artistic task of representing the different national cultures and histories (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, etc.) that inform the U.S. Latino experience. Throughout the quarter we will explore how these fictional narratives offer insights into the topics of American identity, immigration, assimilation, class status, Women of Color feminism, gender and sexuality. In addition, we will also consider contemporary representations from film and television, ultimately working toward a comprehensive analysis of how literary genres and popular cultural contribute to the meaning of Latinidad in the U.S.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
ENGLISH 67N:
The Ethical Gangster: How to be Moral, How to be Good--Mafia Style
Is there a difference between being moral and being good? Does it matter? Does knowing the difference matter at all to how a person should conduct him or herself in close relationships, in social groups, in professional life, in politics? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. This class will explore human moral psychology: the intuitions we have about right and wrong, fair and unfair, harm, justice, loyalty, authority, sanctity, freedom and oppression. We will then relate these intuitions to systematic ethical theories of right and wrong. We will do so by immersing ourselves in a somewhat surprising source¿the greatest hits of Mafia movies from Little Caesar to The Sopranos. We will also consider recent findings in experimental moral psychology.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER
ENGLISH 68N:
Mark Twain and American Culture (AMSTUD 68N)
Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society¿s (and our society¿s) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, 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 79N:
The Renaissance: Culture as Conflict
Focus is on the Renaissance not as a cultural rebirth but as a scene of cultural conflict. Course materials are selected from Renaissance art, history, philosophy, politics, religion, and travel writing; authors include More, Luther, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Shakespeare. Among the conflicts we will explore are: old (world)/new (world), wealth/poverty, individual/collectivity, manuscript/print, religion/secularism, Catholicism/Protestantism, monarchism/republicanism, femininity/masculinity, heterosexuality/homosexuality.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 81:
Philosophy and Literature (CLASSICS 42, 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, with particular focus on the question of value: what, if anything, does engagement with literary works do for our lives? Issues include aesthetic self-fashioning, the paradox of tragedy, the paradox of caring, the truth-value of fiction, metaphor, authorship, irony, make-believe, expression, edification, clarification, and training. Readings are drawn from literature and film, philosophical theories of art, and stylistically interesting works of philosophy. Authors may include Sophocles, Chaucer, Dickinson, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Beckett, Kundera, Charlie Kaufman; Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas; Plato, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Taught in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
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: ;
Clark, H. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Hummel, M. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Petersen, K. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Smith, R. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Tshele, N. (PI);
Willey, P. (PI);
Wolff, T. (PI);
Kletter, D. (GP)
ENGLISH 90Q:
Sports Writing
Study and practice of the unique narratives, tropes, images and arguments that creative writers develop when they write about popular sport. From regional fandom to individualist adventuring, boxing and baseball to mascot dancing and table tennis, exceptional creative writers mine from a diversity of leisure activity a rich vein of ¿sports writing¿ in the creative nonfiction genre. In doing so, they demonstrate the creative and formal adaptability required to write with excellence about any subject matter, and under the circumstances of any subjectivity. Discussion of the ways in which writers have framed, and even critiqued, our interest in athletic events, spectatorship, and athletic beauty. Writers include Joyce Carol Oates, Roland Barthes, David James Duncan, Arnold Rampersad, John Updike, Maxine Kumin, Susan Sterling, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Dervla Murphy, Haruki Murakami, Don DeLillo, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and Laura Hillenbrand. Close readings of essays on form and sport, as well as book excerpts. Students will engage in class discussions and write short weekly papers, leading to a more comprehensive project at the end of the quarter.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90V:
Fiction Writing
Online workshop course that explores the ways in which writers of fiction have used language to examine the world, to create compelling characters, and to move readers. We will begin by studying a selection of stories that demonstrate the many techniques writers use to create fictional worlds; we'll use these stories as models for writing exercises and short assignments, leading to a full story draft. We will study figurative language, character and setting development, and dramatic structure, among other elements of story craft. Then, each student will submit a full draft and receive feedback from the instructor and his/her classmates. This course is taught entirely online, but retains the feel of a traditional classroom. Optional synchronous elements such as discussion and virtual office hours provide the student direct interaction with both the instructor and his/her classmates. Feedback on written work ¿ both offered to and given by the student ¿ is essential to the course and creates class rapport.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
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: ;
Evans, J. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Grey, K. (PI);
Hummel, M. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Marra, A. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Tshele, N. (PI);
Wrenn, G. (PI)
ENGLISH 91Q:
Twitter Fiction/Future Forms
Digital media--from Twitter to the Kindle--are roiling the literary marketplace. But could these new forms and content delivery methods also create new opportunities for creative work? Twitter is a hotbed of adopted personae and clearly false characters; sites from FiveChapters to Plympton are reviving the serial form; new apps feature inventive short fiction. Additionally, established writers, from Margaret Atwood to Jennifer Egan, are harnessing the forms offered by digital media to spur their own artistic invention. In this unsettled landscape, what does it even mean to write fiction? What does it mean to create stories without the assumption of the reader's undivided attention? And what do lessons from our literary history--from Gutenberg to the serial novels of the Victorian age--have to teach us about our current historical moment? These and many more questions will be our subject as we read the exciting work being done in this new world--and then become pioneers ourselves, by writing, workshopping, and publishing our own Twitter fiction and future forms.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
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, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 94:
Creative 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: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 105H:
Medievalism
Course examines the ¿medievalism¿ of nineteenth-century British writers, that is, their adoption of medieval subjects and themes, within the context of medieval literature. Our leading questions cluster around three topics: the quest, Arthurian romance, and the dark side of fairyland. Readings include Marie de France¿s Lais, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory¿s Morte D¿Arthure, Spenser¿s Faerie Queene, Scott¿s Ivanhoe, Stoker¿s Dracula, poems by Morris, R. Browning, and Tennyson, and selections from Tennyson¿s Idylls of the Kings. Requirements include two papers and three short exams.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 106E:
Dante and Aristotle (PHIL 193D)
Students will read all of Dante¿s Commedia alongside works by Aristotle and various ancient and medieval philosophers. Our aim will be to understand the way an Aristotelian worldview informs the Commedia. For instance, what is the role of pleasure in the ethical life? What is the highest good of the human being? All readings will be in translation.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-EthicReas, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
ENGLISH 113A:
Desire, Identity, Modernity
While drawing on classic work in modern queer studies, the course will focus on the role which Renaissance discourses of desire continue to play in our negotiations of homo/erotic subjectivity, identity politics, and sexual and gender difference. We will study Renaissance queerness in relation to the classical tradition on the one hand and the contemporary discourses of religion, medicine, law, and politics on the other. nReadings include diverse genres, from plays and poems to essays, dialogues, letters, etc. Both major and minor authors will be represented"
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 115C:
Hamlet and the Critics (TAPS 151C)
Focus is on Shakespeare's Hamletas a site of rich critical controversy from the eighteenth century to the present. Aim is to read, discuss, and evaluate different approaches to the play, from biographical, theatrical, and psychological to formalist, materialist, feminist, new historicist, and, most recently, quantitative. The ambition is to see whether there can be great literature without (a) great (deal of) criticism. The challenge is to understand the theory of literature through the study of its criticism.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 115D:
Shakespeare, Language, Contexts
This course will consider a range of Shakespeare plays (and the language of the plays) in relation to different contemporary and post-contemporary contexts, including transvestite theater, gender, sexuality, history, geopolitics, travel, and performance.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
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?
Last offered: Autumn 2012
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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.
Last offered: Winter 2008
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 124:
The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)
The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 125B:
Make It New: Literature of the Jazz Age
Introduction to modernism through a survey of its major writers and the world in which they wrote. We will look at poets like T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein who changed the language, prose-writers like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway who changed the story, painters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse who changed the view, and populists like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Chaplin who changed the scene. Along the way we will think about the basic questions of modernism: Who was involved? How did they interact? And perhaps most importantly, what features make their work modernist? With brief but lively introductions to this world, students will gain entry into academic habits of mind through authors and artists they already love.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 125C:
The Lost Generation: American literature between the World Wars (AMSTUD 125C)
An exploration of American literature between the World Wars, with a focus on themes such as expatriation, trauma, technology, race, modernism; writers include Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 127A:
American Madness
This course delves into the bizarre annals of nineteenth-century madness -- the world of Ahab¿s ¿monomania,¿ Edgar Allan Poe¿s ¿brain fever,¿ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman¿s ¿hysteria¿. Placing these literary texts in the context of the historical development of psychiatry during the nineteenth century, we will find that madness often assumes different forms in men and women, white Americans and African-Americans, capitalists and laborers -- suggesting that social inequalities cannot be cleanly separated from biological dispositions in our understanding of insanity. Reading these fictions of madness will not only illuminate the fundamental tensions of American culture, but will give us a new perspective on the construction of mental illness in the contemporary United States.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 134:
The Marriage Plot (FEMGEN 134)
The centrality of the marriage plot in the development of the British novel beginning in the 18th century with Samuel Richardson's Pamela and ending with Woolf's modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between novelistic plotting and the development of female characters into marriageable women. What is the relationship between the novel and feminine subjectivity? What aspects of marriage make it work as a plotting device? What kinds of marriages do marriage plots allow? Is the development of women's political agency related to their prominence in the novel form?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 139B:
American Women Writers, 1850-1920 (AMSTUD 139B, FEMGEN 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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II
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 144:
Major Modernists: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot
What is, or was, literary Modernism (1910-1940)? Why did writers feel such a passionate need to change how fiction traditionally had been written? What did those changes entail? At stake were questions of cultural, political, social and literary historical meaning, including artistic relevance, legacy, and the ever-relevant clash between creative and professional identity. This class will put into dialogue with each other four major innovators, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 144C:
Fractured Classics: Novelistic Rewritings
Why do so many novels confront the past by rewriting, revising, or reinventing their literary forebears? Are post-1945 experiments in revision commonplace, or more characteristic of historical, cultural, and geopolitical changes peculiar to the late 20th-century? How does intertextuality inform narrative voice, authorship, characterization, political and aesthetic conflict, and interrogations of canonization? This course pairs Charlotte Bronte¿s Jane Eyre with Jean Rhys¿s Wide Sargasso Sea; E.M. Forster¿s Howard¿s End with Zadie Smith¿s On Beauty; and Virginia Woolf¿s Mrs Dalloway with Michael Cunningham¿s The Hours.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 144F:
Female Modernists: Women Writers in Paris Between the Wars (FEMGEN 144F)
The course will focus on expatriate women writers - American and British - who lived and wrote in Paris between the wars. Among them: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Margaret Anderson, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks, Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, and Jean Rhys. A central theme will be Paris as a lure and inspiration for bohemian female modernists, and the various alternative and emancipatory literary communities they created.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 145D:
Jewish American Literature (JEWISHST 155D, REES 145D)
A study of Jewish-American literature from its Russian roots into the present. What distinguishes it from American mainstream and minority literatures? We will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation who struggled to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment, and the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their grand)parents¿ nostalgia, trauma, and failure to assimilate. Authors: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Babel, Olsen, Paley, Yezierska, Ozick, Singer, Malamud, Spiegelman, Roth, Bellow, Segal, Baldwin.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 145G:
American Fiction since 1945
An exploration of some of the main themes in post-WWII American fiction, including mass media and markets, race and ethnicity, technology and war. Authors to include Flannery O¿Connor, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Karen Yamashita 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 150:
Poetry and the Internet
How has contemporary poetry been transformed by the Internet and other new media. How have poets responded to the new media forms, from Facebook to Twitter, that now absorb the attention of so many people? How have poets utilized the torrents of information accessible to them with a few keystrokes? Focus will mostly be on poetry written after 2000; secondary readings will draw from literary criticism, media theory, and sociology.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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 151G:
1960s Countercultures in Stanford's Special Collections
From the poetry of the Beats to the protest of the Black Panthers, 1960s countercultures loudly challenged social, aesthetic, and political conventions. While some dissented to mainstream American culture by burning bras, marching for peace, dropping out, and tuning in, others experienced countercultures largely through the media. This course uses the rich resources available only in Stanford¿s Special Collections to explore the ideas, sensibilities, and media representations of 1960s countercultures including civil rights, anti-war, back-to-nature environmentalism, the Beats, feminism, hippies, gay liberation, and Black Power. Meeting each week in Special Collections, students will examine unique archival sources (Allen Ginsberg¿s recordings of Howl, underground comics, letters, photographs, psychedelic rock posters, scrapbooks, LIFE magazine, and more) in order to understand how 1960s countercultural movements sought to revolutionize every aspect of American culture, from individual consciousness to foreign and military policy. This course will be of particular interest to student activists who want to better understand and build on the dissenting traditions of the past. In the spirit of the student-led classrooms of the 1960s, students will become primary investigators of their own original research questions. Course readings will lighten as students spend more time doing independent research in Special Collections.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 151H:
Wastelands
Have human beings ruined the world? Was it war, or industry, or consumerism, or something else that did it? Beginning with an in-depth exploration of some of the key works of literary modernism, this class will trace the image of the devastated landscape as it develops over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, arriving finally at literary representations of the contemporary zombie apocalypse. Authors to include T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, and others.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 152G:
Harlem Renaissance and Modernism (AFRICAAM 152G, AMSTUD 152G)
Examination of the explosion of African American artistic expression during 1920s and 30s New York known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amiri Baraka once referred to the Renaissance as a kind of "vicious Modernism", as a "BangClash", that impacted and was impacted by political, cultural and aesthetic changes not only in the U.S. but Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Focus on the literature, graphic arts, and the music of the era in this global context.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 154E:
Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
Plays, poems, short stories, and novels. Writers include James Joyce, William Yeats, Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien,William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Samuel Beckett. How the writer can sustain imaginative freedom and literary experiment in the face of a turbulent history.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 157:
American Literary Journalism
Literary journalism merges the factual reporting of traditional journalism with the narrative techniques of fiction. This course will follow the development of this influential genre of writing in the U.S. from the 1890s to the present, with special attention to the particularly American emergence of this form in the non-fiction writing published in the New Yorker during the 1930s and 40s and the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s. Engaging with the form¿s most prominent writers, themes, and techniques, we will investigate questions of objectivity and subjectivity, tensions between fact and fiction, and the genre¿s position as a particularly American cultural form.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 157G:
Gaming and Literature: Exploring Connections between Interactive Media and Literary Analysis
Whether struggling as dragon born or raiding ancient tombs, character and story in video games are crucial to an immersive experience. Whether by design or imagination, we vest ourselves in the challenges and puzzles in stories of alien attack, myth and magic, and constructed worlds. Literature and gaming are converging, transforming pixels into rich environments where gamers spend months or years. This course connects characteristics of games and select literary works, guiding analyses of story-driven, active game systems. Students explore story development and critical processes for the synthesis of various game types, and explore social issues connecting games and society.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 159:
James Baldwin & Twentieth Century Literature (AFRICAAM 159, FEMGEN 159)
Black, gay and gifted, Baldwin was hailed as a ¿spokesman for the race¿¿although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. This course examines his classic novels and essays as well his exciting work across many lesser-examined domains¿poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children¿s literature, public media, comedy and artistic collaboration. Placing his work in context with other writers of the 20C (Faulkner, Wright,Morrison) and capitalizing on a resurgence of interest in the writer (NYC just dedicated a year of celebration of Baldwin and there are 2 new journals dedicated to study of Baldwin), the course seeks to capture the power and influence of Baldwin's work during the Civil Rights era as well as his relevance in the ¿post-race¿ transnational 21st century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership and country assume new urgency.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
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 162W:
Writing Intensive Seminar in English (WISE)
Small literature-based, writing-intensive seminars taught by advanced graduate students in the English Ph.D. program. The goal will be to produce a high-quality final research paper. Courses will be oriented around a single text or a small group of texts in conversation with a larger spectrum of scholarship and knowledge in literary criticism and theory, film, painting, or material culture. The small format will allow undergraduates to receive detailed commentary and one-on-one feedback on their writing.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 163:
Shakespeare
Readings of six Shakespeare plays, with attention to poetic and dramatic elements, performance history, and historical and cultural contexts.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 164C:
English Capstone Project
Do you want to design your own capstone research project in English? The capstone is a self-designed project on an author, critical concept, topic, or historical period that motivates you to dig more deeply into literary research. It consolidates skills in reading, critical analysis, imaginative interpretation, writing, revising and editing which are cornerstones to the broader study of English literature. Does a whole quarter¿s focus on sharing with similarly-focused peers your progress toward a 15-20 page research paper appeal to you?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 166:
Who were the Vikings? (GERMAN 166)
Who were the Vikings and what has been their influence on contemporary culture? This course provides a broad introduction to Viking society and culture as well as to their legacy in the modern world. We will look at Viking life, mythology, literature, art and archaeology as well as modern adaptations of Viking culture in music, literature, film and television. We will read some of the great works of Viking literature ¿ tales of Odin and Thor, of magic and monsters, of adventures across the seas - and examine online exhibitions of Vikings artefacts and settlements in Europe and Newfoundland. During the first half of the course, students will begin thinking about their final project ¿ a creative reimagining one of the texts or artefacts which we will discuss in class. The latter half of the course will focus on the development of the Vikings as a cultural model for modern creative expression. We will investigate how Norse themes, characters and forms were adapted in Germany, England and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by writers, artists and composers such as Richard Wagner, William Morris, Henry Longfellow and J.R.R. Tolkien. The course will conclude with a discussion of how the Vikings (and Viking ideas) are represented today in popular culture, including the 1958 Kirk Douglas film, ¿the Vikings¿, the TV shows ¿The Vikings¿ and ¿Game of Thrones¿ and the Marvel comic books series. Students will be encouraged to examine the ways in which these texts engage with their historical models and consider how this might influence their own creative project.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 167C:
¿Wandering in Strange Lands¿: Science Fiction of the Black Atlantic (CSRE 167C)
African-American culture critic Greg Tate once remarked that ¿Black people live the estrangement that science fiction authors imagine¿. In light of his observation, this course proposes to look at the black science fiction (SF) tradition from a variety of angles. Some examples: How do black authors use familiar speculative tropes, such as encounters with aliens, to comment on matters of race? What happens when tropes from African-American realist fiction, such as the passing narrative, become science fictionalized? How does the intersection of race and gender affect speculative works by black women? And perhaps the most central question: What do we gain by looking at matters of race through the lens of SF?
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 167D:
The Mystery Plot
Though the mystery is often equated with a single genre¿detective fiction¿its literary examples stretch beyond the confines of a particular genre or period. This course focuses on the evolution of the modern mystery plot, tracing a long arc from its emergence in the eighteenth-century Gothic novel to its contemporary reinventions in the television procedural and the true crime podcast. Moving from the medieval castle to the urban street, the open sea to the country estate, we will investigate the extraordinary range and resilience of one of the most fundamental narrative forms across historical contexts. We¿ll analyze the use of serial form in Wilkie Collins¿ The Moonstone and the podcast sensation Serial; the invention of the clue and the transformations of the detective in the writings of De Quincey, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Hammett; and the production of suspense in Radcliffe¿s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Melville¿s Benito Cereno. Throughout the course we will pay special attention to the mystery¿s uncertain relationship to the novel, to realism, and to the literary itself.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 167H:
The Ethical Gangster
(English majors must register for 5 units) A study of recent developments in understanding human moral psychology using mafia movies to explore the differences between Kantian and Utilitarian moral theory. We will study the greatest hits of gangster fiction and film, from Fielding's Jonathan Wild to The Sopranos.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-EthicReas, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
ENGLISH 168:
Imagining the Oceans (COMPLIT 168, FRENCH 168)
How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Authors read might include Cook, Equiano, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Verne, Stevenson, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Films by Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar co-ordinated with a spring 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 171A:
English in the World
In this course we shall try to sample a small selection of the richness and the complexity of English as a language of world literature outside its canonical location of England and the US. We will focus on the variations in language-use and cultural contexts, the relationships of such Anglophone literatures with western and indigenous cultural forms, and the complex histories that have formed the contexts of such literary productions.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 172:
Modernity and the Vernacular in Indian Literature
This course will seek to get a sense of modern India through its various rich literary traditions, including, vernacular literatures in English translation in addition to the Anglophone tradition. 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?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
ENGLISH 172D:
Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (COMPLIT 195, 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. Includes an optional Haas Center for Public Service certified Community Engaged Learning section.
Terms: Aut
| 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 inncomparative 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.
Last offered: Winter 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 172J:
The Ethics of Metaphor: Identities in Parallel (CSRE 119F)
Many of our political arguments are arguments by analogy. But analogies between ethnic and racial experiences are especially problematic, and especially incendiary. This class will think about metaphor and contend with how it¿s used in both fictional and nonfictional texts concerning race and ethnicity. nThe works we will read in this class are uncomfortable. They¿re uncomfortable because they address suffering and pain; they¿re uncomfortable because they compare suffering and pain; they¿re uncomfortable because of what they get right and because of what they don¿t. This is a class fundamentally concerned with how we traverse boundaries of race and ethnicity ethically, and about thinking through when and how authors have failed to do so. When does empathy become presumption? When does altruism become condescension? When does exploration become voyeurism? We will plumb these questions (to which there are no clear answers) through the lens of speeches, poetry, sci-fi, film, essays, short stories, and novels.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 179:
Cultures of Disease: Cancer and HIV/AIDS (ANTHRO 179)
History, politics, science, and anthropology of cancer; political and economic issues of disease and health care in the U.S., including the ethics and economics of health care provision, the pharmaceutical industry, carcinogen production, and research priorities.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 179E:
Reading and Rereading Moby-Dick
For many, Herman Melville¿s Moby-Dick is the greatest novel in all of American literature, an undisputed classic. When Moby-Dick was first published, however, it was a critical and commercial failure. This class will encourage students to reflect on the nature of literary experience by staging an initial reading of Moby-Dick followed by a somewhat abbreviated second reading. We will consider why readers overlooked Moby-Dick when it was originally published, and why readers later, after a second closer inspection, gained a greater appreciation for the novel. We will think about what happens when we encounter a text for the first time, and how different kinds of meaning might accumulate over multiple readings. We will also watch film adaptations of Moby-Dick in an attempt to comprehend how filmmakers over the course of the twentieth century have re-presented the novel to audiences. In the end, this course offers students the chance to study a literary classic in depth. We will read and reread Moby-Dick to better understand how literature works, and how American literary history has taken shape.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 180C:
Technologies of Enlightenment
Re-examination of the Enlightenment through its cultural, literary and technological revolutions. To recover an understanding of these transformations, we will use our new digital databases of eighteenth-century works to sample a wide variety of lesser known or forgotten texts. Whether these works became outdated, whether they were censored or whether they were just too weird, we will combine them with canonical readings from the period to recover the importance of socio-technological revolution to the Enlightenment.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 182J:
"When We Dead Awaken": Breakthroughs in Conceptions of the Gendered Self in Literature and the Arts (FEMGEN 112, FEMGEN 212)
Remarkable breakthroughs In conceptions of the gendered self are everywhere evident in literature and the arts, beginning primarily with the Early Modern world and continuing into today. Many of these works inhere in innovations in literary and artistic forms in order to capture and even evoke the strong cognitive, or psychological, dimension of such ¿awakenings.¿ The reader, or viewer, is often challenged to adapt her or his mind to new forms of thought, such as John Donne¿s seventeenth century creation of the Dramatic Monologue, a form popular with modern writers, which requires the reader¿s cognitive ¿presence¿ in order to fill out the dramatic scene. In so doing, the reader often supplies the presence of the female voice and thereby enters into her self-consciousness and inner thoughts. Adrienne Rich, for example, specifically ¿rewrites¿ one of Donne¿s major poems from the female perspective. This can be, in Rich¿s words, an ¿awakening¿ for the active reader, as he or she assumes that often-unspoken female perspective. The course will also explore male conceptions of the self and how such conceptions are often grounded in cultural attitudes imposed on male subjects, which can contribute to gender-bias toward women, a subject often neglected in exploring gendered attitudes, but which is now gaining more study, for example, in Shakespeare¿s ¿Othello.¿ Readings from recent developments in the neurosciences and cognitive studies will be included in our study of artistic forms and how such forms can activate particular mindsets. Writers and artists will include Shakespeare, Michelangelo, John Donne, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, June Wayne, and Edward Albee¿s 1960¿s play, ¿Who¿s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?¿
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 184:
The Novel (COMPLIT 123)
Literary inventiveness and social significance of novelistic forms from the Great Depression to the present.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
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 184E:
Literary Text Mining
This course will train students in applied methods for computationally analyzing texts for humanities research. The skills students will gain will include basic programming for textual analysis, applied statistical evaluation of results and the ability to present these results within a formal research paper or presentation. As an introduction, students in this course will also learn the prerequisite steps of such an analysis including corpus selection and cleaning, metadata collection, and selecting and creating an appropriate visualization for the results.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-AQR
ENGLISH 184H:
Text Technologies: A History (STS 200D)
Beginning with cave painting, carving, cuneiform, hieroglyph, and other early textual innovations, survey of the history of writing, image, sound, and byte, all text technologies employed to create, communicate and commemorate. Focus on the recording of language, remembrance and ideas explicating significant themes seen throughout history; these include censorship, propaganda, authenticity, apocalypticism, technophobia, reader response, democratization and authority. The production, transmission and reception of tablet technology, the scroll, the manuscript codex and handmade book, the machine-made book, newspapers and ephemera; and investigate the emergence of the phonograph and photograph, film, radio, television and digital multimedia.The impact of these various text technologies on their users, and try to draw out similarities and differences in our cultural and intellectual responses to evolving technologies. STS majors must have senior status to enroll in this senior capstone course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 186B:
American Crime
Examination of the representations of crime in American literature and film with particular focus on the construction of motive and its relation to character. We will pay special attention to the orientation of the writer/director to his or her criminal subject. Writers may include Melville, Wright, McCarthy, Capote, Mailer. Directors will include Berlinger and Sinofsky (the Paradise Lost trilogy) and Patty Jenkins (Monster).
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 187E:
CLR James & Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Two Postcolonial Intellectuals
Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact at odds with the established norms of scholarship? Is such an intellectual, to use Marjorie Garber¿s terms, a professional or an amateur? This course considers these questions in the light of the institutionalization of a humanist curriculum in late colonial Britain and its overseas empire in order to examine two key (post)colonial intellectuals, from Trinidad and India respectively: CLR James and Nirad C. Chaudhuri, both of whose popular and provocative appeals derive from their positions as amateurs and autodidacts. Such an intellectual identity is at odds with colonial education¿s ideological enterprise: to create a certain kind of professional subject. We will read their key works, pay attention to their biographies, and to the intellectual histories surrounding these two key figures of postcolonial thought.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 187F:
Everyday Matters
Literature is often imagined as a phenomenon that enables a magical transcendence of a dull, routinized life. But are there ways in which literature might also be thought of assuming shape and texture from the ordinary everyday that we all experience? Some argue that prior to its relatively modern understanding in terms of specific set of art-objects and artistic practice, the aesthetic was understood as an integral part of the sensory experience of everyday life in all its beauty and messiness. This course will try to capture representations of the ordinary in modern and contemporary literature and engage with anthropological and sociological attempts to understand the elusive category of everyday life.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
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 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
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 191V:
Reading for Creative Non-Fiction Writers
Taught by the Stein Visiting Writer. Prerequisite English 90 or 91. Permission number required to enroll.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
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
| 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. Permission number required to enroll.
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 195B:
How to Write a Great Essay: A Writing Bootcamp for Undergraduates
Practical workshop for undergraduates on how to improve essay-writing skills. Focus on the finer points of vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, logic, timing, intellectual precision; how to connect with (and delight) an audience; how to magnify a theme; how to deflect counter-arguments; how to develop your own sophisticated authorial 'style'; how to write sentences (and papers!) your reader will care about and admire and maybe even remember. The course has been designed with humanities students and especially English majors in mind, but any student who hopes to improve his or her writing should be able to benefit from the practical instruction on offer. The course enrollment will be limited to 12 students and the class run as a workshop. The reading component will be comparatively light. Over the course of the quarter we will read two novels--J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita--modern fictional masterpieces both, and students will be writing blog notes and short papers for each book.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 197:
Seniors Honors Essay
In two quarters.
Terms: Aut, 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);
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Gluck, L. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Marra, A. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Shewmaker, M. (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 198F:
Hoffs-Roach Fiction into Film Tutorial
Up to three undergraduate writers work with Fiction Into Film instructors. Students design their own curriculum, and Instructors act as writing mentors and advisers. Prerequisite: 190F. Submitted manuscript required.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2-5
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
| 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: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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 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?
Last offered: Autumn 2012
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 233:
Baroque and Neobaroque (COMPLIT 233, ILAC 293E)
The literary, cultural, and political implications of the 17th-century phenomenon formed in response to the conditions of the 16th century including humanism, absolutism, and early capitalism, and dispersed through Europe, the Americas, and Asia. If the Baroque is a universal code of this period, how do its vehicles, such as tragic drama, Ciceronian prose, and metaphysical poetry, converse with one another? The neobaroque as a complex reaction to the remains of the baroque in Latin American cultures, with attention to the mode in recent Brazilian literary theory and Mexican poetry.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 239B:
Literature and Social Online Learning (COMPLIT 239B, CS 27)
Study, develop, and test new digital methods, games, apps, interactive social media uses to innovate how the humanities can engage and educate students and the public today. Exploring well-known literary texts, digital storytelling forms and literary communities online, students work individually and in interdisciplinary teams to develop innovative projects aimed at bringing literature to life. Tasks include literary role-plays on Twitter; researching existing digital pedagogy and literary projects, games, and apps; reading and coding challenges; collaborative social events mediated by new technology. Minimal prerequisites which vary for students in CS and the humanities; please check with instructors.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 241:
Eighteenth-Century Women Writers (FEMGEN 241W)
The course will deal with a number of eighteenth-century English women writers--primarily novelists, but also poets, critics and playwrights. Authors to be studied in depth will include both relatively well-known writers such as Behn and Wollstonecraft, and lesser-known authors such as Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Inchbald and Anna Seward. Considerable attention will be paid to recent feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century women's writing, generic issues and the question of a "women's literary tradition," the material conditions of female authorship in the period, and the history of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 262C:
African American Literature and the Retreat of Jim Crow (AFRICAAM 262C, AMSTUD 262C, CSRE 262C)
After the unprecedented carnage of WWII, the postwar era witnessed the slow decline of the segregated Jim Crow order and the onset of landmark civil rights legislation. What role did African American literature and culture play in this historical process? What does this shift in racial theory and praxis mean for black literary production, a tradition constituted by the experience of slavery and racial oppression? Focus on these questions against the backdrop of contemporaneous developments: the onset of the Cold War, decolonization and the formation of the Third World, and the emergence of the "new liberalism.".
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 265F:
Literature of the American Renaissance: 1850-1855
Between 1850 and 1855, some of the most influential works of 19th-century American literature were published: Melville¿s Moby-Dick, Hawthorne¿s The Scarlet Letter, Stowe¿s Uncle Tom¿s Cabin, Thoreau¿s Walden, Douglass¿s My Bondage and My Freedom, and Whitman¿s Leaves of Grass. Under pressure to invent a literature commensurate with the anomalies of American life, these writers achieved an astonishing degree of formal novelty. We will look closely at the ensuing difficulties of interpretation and their significance as precursors of literary modernism.
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. May be repeat for credit
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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: Win
| 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: Win
| Units: 4
ENGLISH 300:
Medieval Methodologies (DLCL 300, MUSIC 300C)
An introduction to the essential tool-kit for medievalists, this course will give all medievalists a great head start in knowing how to access and interpret major works and topics in the field. Stanford's medieval faculty will explain the key sources and methods in the major disciplines from History to Religion, French to Arabic, English to Chinese, and Art History to German and Music. In so doing, students will be introduced to the breadth and interdisciplinary potential of Medieval Studies. A workshop devoted to Digital Technologies and Codicology/Palaeography will offer elementary training in these fundamental skills.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-3
ENGLISH 301B:
Love and Loss in Early English, 900-1300
Examination of what makes literature so human. We'll investigate heroic, lyrical and religious voices in the earlier Middle Ages from 900-1300 to discover what connects early literature and culture to our modern world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 303:
Experiment and the Novel (COMPLIT 353A)
A double exploration of experiment in the novel from 1719 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. Texts by: Sterne, Walpole, Burney, Sade, Godwin, Lewis, and Goethe. Substantial readings in the theory of the novel.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 313:
Performance and Performativity (FEMGEN 313, TAPS 313)
Performance theory through topics including: affect/trauma, embodiment, empathy, theatricality/performativity, specularity/visibility, liveness/disappearance, belonging/abjection, and utopias and dystopias. Readings from Schechner, Phelan, Austin, Butler, Conquergood, Roach, Schneider, Silverman, Caruth, Fanon, Moten, Anzaldúa, Agamben, Freud, and Lacan. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-4
| Repeatable
for credit
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 315:
Theories of Tragedy
From classical Athens to the present, critics have repeatedly redefined tragedy, and in modernity they have often identified the predicaments of individual and social existence with the tragic. We will read the major theorists of tragedy and the tragic from Aristotle to the present together with a handful of touchstone tragedies. Dramatists include Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine, and Milton. Theorists include Aristotle, Renaissance humanists, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Vernant, Steiner, and recent critics.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 317A:
Irony
Varieties of literary irony from Plato through the present. Topics include: verbal, dramatic, situational, and romantic irony. Focus will be 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 Chaucer, Swift, Thomas Mann, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 327:
Genres of the Novel (COMPLIT 327, FRENCH 327)
Provides students with an overview of some major genres in the history of the modern novel, along with major theorists in the critical understanding of the form. Novels might include works by Cervantes, Defoe, Lafayette, Radcliffe, Goethe, Scott, Balzac, Melville, and Woolf. Theorists might include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Jameson, Gallagher, Barthes, Kristeva, and Bourdieu. *PLEASE NOTE: Course for graduate students only.*
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 334A:
Concepts of Modernity I: 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.nThis 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 II: Culture, Aesthetics, and Society in the Age of Globalization (COMPLIT 334B, MTL 334B)
Emphasis on world-system theory, theories of coloniality and power, and aesthetic modernity/postmodernity in their relation to culture broadly understood.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 338:
The Gothic in Literature and Culture (COMPLIT 338, FRENCH 338)
This course examines the Gothic as a both a narrative subgenre and an aesthetic mode, since its 18th century invention. Starting with different narrative genres of Gothic expression such as the Gothic novel, the ghost tale, and the fantastic tale by writers such as Walpole, Radcliffe, Sade, Poe, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the course goes on to ask how the Gothic sensibility permeates a wide range of 19th century cultural phenomena that explore the dark side of Enlightenment, from Romantic poetry and art to melodrama, feuilleton novels, popular spectacles like the wax museum and the morgue. If time permits, we will also ask how the Gothic is updated into our present in popular novels and cinema. Critical readings will examine both the psychology of the Gothic sensibility and its social context, and might be drawn from theorists such as Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Zizek.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 344A:
Drama and Poetry: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson
The course considers major playwrights who were also major poets; and examines the relation both between the drama and the non-dramatic poetry, and between text and performance, manuscript and publication. Plays discussed will include Doctor Faustus, the three texts of Hamlet and the two of Troilus and Cressida, and Volpone and The Alchemist. Poetry will include Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the Shakespeare sonnets, poems of Jonson¿s, and Marlowe¿s Hero and Leander.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 360D:
Freud and Literary Criticism
The course constitutes both a broad overview of Freudian theory and a collective conversation on the usefulness of Freud's ideas for literary scholarship in our 'post-post-post' age. The readings include a selection of classic Freud essays and case histories, as well as excerpts from The Interpretation of Dreams. In conjunction with the primary works, several short British and American literary works (by H.D., Edith Wharton and others) and three Hitchcock films-, Rope, Rear Window and Vertigo. The intellectual goal here is to consider how well such works might serve as 'test cases' for a reinvented 21st-century Freudian interpretation.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 365:
Fictions of Literary Being
An inquiry into the nature of fictionalization through an examination of the mutual construction of author, character, and reader in the novel. What is the nature of literary being? Does an ontological crossing-over occur in the act of reading? If so, what conditions enable that passage? Where do we locate the foundational antithesis of flesh and word? To what degree is it possible to differentiate autobiography, memoir, and novel? We¿ll read Roth, Kenzaburo Oe, Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Nabokov, and Barthes.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 366:
Practicing Theories
An exploration of the some of the main currents in post-WWII and contemporary literary theory from the new criticism to deconstruction, new historicism, etc., arriving at contemporary debates about surface reading, digital humanities, affect, and the new materialisms.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 366G:
Poetics Now and Then
The fundamental issues and recent problems in poetics. Exploration of both classic statements and current scholarship to obtain an overview of a field in the process of renewal. Topics may include the nature of the poetic; figurative language; technical, social and historical approaches; poetological accounts of major periods and movements (e.g. the baroque, classicism, symbolism, modernism, Language poetry); and recent experiments in poetry that respond to developments in poetics. Both the scholarship and the poems under consideration come from multiple traditions, national and ideological. Readings include works by Auerbach, Jakobson, De Man, Paz, Hartman, Forrest-Thomson, and Agamben.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 368A:
Imagining the Oceans (COMPLIT 368A, FRENCH 368A)
How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might include Cook, Banks, Equiano, Ricketts, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Critical readings include Schmitt, Rediker and Linebaugh, Baucom, Best, Corbin, Auden, Sontag and Heller-Roazen. Films by Sekula, Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar coordinated with a 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to the Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park. Open to graduate students only.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 369D:
Lost Bestsellers of Nineteenth Century Britain
Great forgotten successes of 19th-century literature, and what they teach us about literary history and literary form
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 375A:
Renaissance Literature and Politics after the New Historicism
A major critical and theoretical legacy, the New Historicism continues to inform, in both positive and negative ways, the recent scholarly work devoted to the relationship between literature and history in the early modern period. While focusing on issues of political meaning and political thought that both inform literary production and are partly shaped by it, the seminar will ask what it means to have a dominant critical paradigm for the understanding of fundamental relations between literary and non-literary (or at least less literary) discourses. Even though we will be studying major Renaissance authors such as Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, the theoretical and methodological issues the course is designed to raise transcend period boundaries. We will look at recent scholarly production in the field of early modern studies to see how scholars go about defining and positioning their critical agendas in their attempts to offer new or modified conceptions of the relationship between Renaissance literature, and literature more generally, and politics.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 381B:
Theories of Race and Ethnicity
This interdisciplinary and reading-intensive course has been designed to familiarize you with the key scholars, as well as the most recent developments, in theorizations of race and ethnicity in literary and cultural studies, performance studies, visual studies, and philosophy. As we work our way through this diverse set of readings, particular attention will be paid to how the various approaches illuminate key issues under current debate: subjectivity, identity, biological difference, racial representation, affect, and political activism.
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 and third year Ph.D. oral exam.
Terms: Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lupic, I. (PI);
Majumdar, S. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Treharne, E. (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, Spr
| 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
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 396P:
Publication Workshop: The Article
For English Ph.D. candidates only. 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 work on developing an already polished piece of writing into the form of an article publishable by a peer-reviewed publication. Admission by application in Autumn quarter .
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 396R:
Old and Modern(ist) Reading Group
This two-quarter-long reading group will alternate from week-to-week between Old English Biblical and Elegaic Poetry and David Jones¿s twentieth-century transnational Modernist masterpiece, "Anathemata" (which W. H. Auden called very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century). Students can choose to join biweekly for just Old English (in the original language) or just David Jones, or complete both sets of allied reading.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 2
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: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lupic, I. (PI);
Majumdar, S. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Sohn, S. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 398L:
Literary Lab (COMPLIT 398L)
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: 2-5
| 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, Sum
| 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);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lupic, I. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (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);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
