Results for ENGLISH

When "inadmissible" desires and "illegible" racial identities intersect, what do their complex entanglements make visible? What histories do they illuminate? What other worlds do they make possible? Thinking with Alexander Chee's Edinburgh (2000), Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003), and Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), this course explores queer Asian American literary narratives as imperatives for fuller understandings of Asian American racial and sexual identities - and as critical interventions in the Asian American literary canon. Drawing in supplementary short stories, poetry, and art, as well as readings in criticism and theory, we will also consider: how might the doubly "inscrutable" figure of the queer Asian American destabilize the very boundaries of "Asian America" itself? No previous exposure to Asian American critique or queer theory expected: students of all backgrounds are welcome. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)

In this course, we will ask how acts of reading, writing, and interpretation change across different mediums, softwares, platforms, and contexts. The digital turn has fractured the historical connection between literature and the printed page, and rooted our everyday writing on seemingly immaterial mediums. So, why do we still read physical books in a world where practically all text has been digitized, a world where we have Red Dead Redemption and Wikipedia? What is the book as a literary object doing today? How have digital-age writers?particularly writers of color?reimagined the book as a means for representing historical trauma through experiments in image and typography? How, more broadly, has the digitization of communication transformed or displaced literary forms and experiences? What even is 'literary writing' (or, for that matter, 'academic writing')? To explore these questions, we will consider various mediums of reading and writing?including letters (Emily Dickinson and Eminem), artists' books (Edward Ruscha and Rupi Kaur), sound (Amiri Baraka, Kendrick Lamar, Tracie Morris), video games (Emily is Away, Doki Doki Literature Club!), fan fiction, and more?drawing on readings in media studies and reader response theory as critical frameworks for our inquiries. To supplement these readings, we will experiment with writing in several forms and platforms, exploring how different media both constrain and enable unique forms of expression and interpretation. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)

In this course, we will consider how unsociability, or anti-sociability, became a major literary trope of modernity. Reading texts by Jane Austen (Emma), James Hogg (Confessions of a Justified Sinner), and Charles Baudelaire (a translated selection of poetry and prose), we will encounter such figures as the outcast, the egotist, and the fl¿neur, and ask how they came to predominate the literary imagination. We will also engage with a variety of critical approaches as we explore questions about the aesthetics and politics of unsociability and the modern social configurations in which they took shape. With Hogg, we will think about political voice and the scapegoat's ironic mode of social critique. With Austen, we will attend to the nexus of narrative, competition, and civility, as we consider the gendered division of forms of unsociability. With Baudelaire, we will turn to the modern city and explore the psychology and philosophy underpinning its emerging cultural heroes. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)

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. NOTE: For undergraduates only. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

How do we tell stories in the age of the internet, social media, and new technology? How has the art of storytelling evolved over time? In this Creative Writing course we will explore storytelling in the digital age. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own personal projects, and considering ways in which storytelling has shifted from oral traditions to modern iterations like podcasts, songwriting, filmmaking, and multimedia. Assignments will range from reading Justin Torres' novel, 'We the Animals,' to watching films like 'Birdman' and 'La Jet¿e.' We will be listening to albums, looking at photo essays, and frequently meeting outdoors to tell stories around a fire. Anyone with a sense of adventure is welcome!

How can your interest in science and the environment be enriched by a regular creative practice? How do you begin to write a poem or essay about the wonders of the natural world or the nuances of climate change? What are the tools and strategies available to creative writers, and how can these techniques be used to communicate complex concepts and research to wide-audiences? We begin to answer these questions by drawing inspiration from the rich tradition of scientists who write and writers who integrate science. Emphasizing writing process over finished product, students maintain journals throughout the quarter, responding to daily prompts that encourage both practice and play. Through open-ended and exploratory writing, along with specific exercises to learn the writer's craft students develop a sense of their own style and voice. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

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Handwriting has a long history and significance. Think about Toni Morrison's diaries; a note by Einstein; a Laozi manuscript from the second century; Elizabeth I's poems; hieroglyphic laws; an electronic signature; a postcard from a friend. This course will investigate the history of handwriting, focusing on the importance of the technology and its digital aspects. We shall consider the training and physical efforts of scribes, and the transmission of knowledge, including that of traditionally oral cultures. We'll look at the development of western scripts, gain insight about materials and tools (from animal skin to reed pens) and learn calligraphy from an expert modern scribe, the better to understand the skill and aesthetic of this most everyday of technologies that, I shall argue, will outlive all others

This class looks at the tradition of the imagined universe in fiction and poetry. Special topics include magical realism, artificial intelligence, and dystopias. 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. For undergrads only.

Nothing is harder than being funny on purpose. We often associate humor with lightness, and sometimes that's appropriate, but humor is inextricably interlinked with pain and anger, and our funniest moments often spring from our deepest wounds. Humor can also allow us a platform for rage and indignation when other forms of rhetoric feel inadequate. This workshop will take students through the techniques and aesthetics of humor writing, in a variety of forms, and the main product of the quarter will be to submit for workshop a sustained piece of humor writing. For undergrads only.

We will consider both the very short poems of these three master poets -- asking what precisely is the virtue and effect of these shortest linguistic art objects -- as well as their very long works or sequences, to think about scale and singularity or repetition in poetic utterance.

The college campus is a fascinating place, where people from different backgrounds come together for different purposes. So it is no wonder that many novelists have turned their attention upon the college campus as a setting for their novels. In this Sophomore Seminar, we will read three fantastic campus novels, and use these books as means of exploring big questions about the purpose of an undergraduate education.

For student-run workshops and research seminars in Ng House / Humanities House. Open to both residents and non-residents. May be repeated for credit. This course code covers several discrete workshops each quarter; sign up for a particular workshop via the Google Form at https://goo.gl/forms/TRU0AogJP3IHyUmr2.

Austen's finely wrought novels were unlike any previous fiction, offering an intensely realized example of literary originality. This class focuses on Austen's major writing, all published in a remarkable ten year period. These novels - including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion - have had a profound impact on the development and understanding of the novel as an art form. We'll take the measure of Austen's inventiveness and her subtle, engrossing experiments in narrative voice, fictional character, representation and literary form. Our two goals will be to closely engage each novel (looking at the major interpretative and aesthetic questions that are generated) and to track the rich dialogue that takes place between her different texts when they are read together.

What's `culture'? There is no such thing as `British culture' as a coherent singular phenomenon, but `culture' can be a useful lens to think about a place, its entanglement with the past and the rest of the world. In this class we can understand how the ideas and social relations that constitute the common-sense fiction of British culture and the very notions of `Britishness', `Englishness', etc. came about historically and are sustained in contemporary contexts. As well as learn how to use `culture' as a heuristic-critical tool to make sense of a particular place's entanglement in history, politics, and cultural production.

Can novels make us better people? Can movies challenge our assumptions? Can poems help us become who we are? We'll think about these and other questions with the help of writers like Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust, Jordan Peele, Charlie Kaufman, Rachel Cusk, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Beckett, plus thinkers like Nehamas, Nietzsche, Nussbaum, Plato, and Sartre. We'll also ask whether a disenchanted world can be re-enchanted; when, if ever, the truth stops being the most important thing; why we sometimes choose to read sad stories; whether we ever love someone for who they are; who could possibly want to live their same life over and over again; what it takes to make ourselves fully moral; whether it's ever good to be conflicted; how we can pull ourselves together; and how we can take ourselves apart. (This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.)

The elements of fiction writing: narration, description, and dialogue. Students write complete stories and participate in story workshops. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter). NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

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.

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. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter and for SLE students). NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Open to DCI Fellows and Partners only. In this course, we will practice the art and craft of writing memoir: works of prose inspired by the memory of personal events and history. In our practice, we will look at different strategies for writing with meaning and insight about the events in our lives. We will read a variety of models by published authors who have made sense of the personal alongside the profound: the sad, joyful, simple and complicated stuff of living and being alive. Our learning will be discussion-driven. You should expect to do daily writing in the class, and to write and read widely between our class meetings. We will read, discuss, and imitate excerpts of memoirs by such authors as Augustine, Andrew Solomon, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Joan Didion, and Eavan Boland, among many others. At least half of our class time will be devoted to the discussion of participants' work. The course will address issues ranging from how we select and write about events from our personal lives, to the ethical obligations of memoirists, to the ways we can explore new understanding about the past, as well as our own courage and reluctance to share personal writing. Writers at all levels of experience and comfort with creative writing are very welcome.

Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. Prerequisite: PWR 1. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

What do we mean when we call something Shakespearean? It is not uncommon to see the adjective tied to political scandals, prestige television (e.g. Succession), or inventive lyricists. But then again, for the Romantics, Shakespeare also represented the artist who disappeared behind his works?the chameleon poet whose characters become free artists unto themselves. In this course, we will read a selection of poems and plays to explore what, if anything, is Shakespearean about Shakespeare. Is there a tragic vision that is particularly Shakespearean? How has same-sex desire, ubiquitous in the poems and plays, been erased from the mainstream conception of the Shakespearean? Is there a particularly Shakespearean understanding of gender? Is there a Shakespearean politics? A Shakespearean philosophy? While we pursue this essence of Shakespeare, we will also be thinking about what it means for Shakespeare to have become an "essential" author in the canon of English literature. This course should appeal to Shakespearean devotees and skeptics alike, as well as neutral parties, since, as we might conclude, there is nothing more Shakespearean than ambivalence.

Jacobean tragedy refers to the high-water mark of English tragedy achieved during the reign of James I. Think Othello and Macbeth. During these years (1603-25) Shakespeare and his talented contemporaries unflinchingly examined the role played by lust, violence, political intrigue, revenge ('a wild kind of justice'), and the certitude of death in constituting the meaning of human existence. We will read classic examples of this 'theater of cruelty' by Shakespeare and his rivals and collaborators Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster.

Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse.English majors must take this class for 5 units.

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. English majors must take this class for 5 units.

This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of contemporary Asian American storytellers, with an emphasis on work produced within the past five years. We will investigate the pressures historically placed on Asian Americans to tell a certain kind of story e.g. the immigrant story in a realist mode and the ways writers have found to surprise, question, and innovate, moving beyond those boundaries to explore issues of race, sexuality, science, memory, citizenship, and belonging. Course materials will consist of novels, short stories, graphic narrative, and film, and may include work by Ocean Vuong, Mira Jacobs, Gish Jen, Charles Yu, and Adrian Tomine, as well as Lulu Wangs 2019 film The Farewell. This seminar will feature both analytical and creative components, and students will be encouraged to produce both kinds of responses to the material.

How do I translate my interests and skills into a career in public service and social impact? This course will introduce you to a wide range of roles that help shape public policy and civic life, including government, education, nonprofits, social enterprises, and arts/media. It can be taken for one or two units. For one unit, you participate in a weekly, interactive speaker series designed to give you a sense for what different public service careers are like. Each week, guests describe their organizations and roles, highlight key intellectual issues and policy challenges, discuss their career paths, and describe skills crucial for the job. For a second unit, you participate in a hands-on weekly session designed to help you translate this knowledge into action. You will identify roles and organizations that might be a good match for you, build your network through informational interviewing, receive career coaching, and acquire the tools you need to launch your job or internship search. This course is intended for all students and all majors. Course content will be relevant to students soon entering the job market as well as those facing choices about courses of study and internships. Class sessions will be 60 minutes. This course is co-sponsored by the Haas Center for Public Service, the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Stanford in Government. Students taking the course for one unit (Tuesday lecture) must enroll in the -01 course option, and students taking the course for two units (Tuesday lecture and Thursday seminar) must enroll in the -02 course option. IR approved.

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. Students in the 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. This class is enrollment by permission only. To request a spot in the class, please fill out the survey: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6PrXGyFeo7g5eNU

'In her this brutal monster': Literature of Mental Illness. How have literary traditions of madness informed modern fiction's portrayals of the human mind, particularly in the context of rapidly shifting cultural frameworks about the origins and manifestations of mental illness? What are the repercussions of new forms, trends and genres for parsing (or blurring) the line between condition and personhood? Using the novels of Akwaeke Emezi, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Leslie Marmon Silko to guide our inquiries, we'll consider inherited and new metaphors of madness in light of emerging theoretical interpretations of disability, identity, gender and trauma.

Intermediate course in the craft and art of fiction writing. Students read a diverse range of short stories and novel excerpts, complete writing exercises, and submit a short and longer story to be workshopped and revised. Prerequisite: 90 or 91. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

The main requirement for this course is a 50,000 word novel. The course explores elements of novel writing including fictional structure, character creation, scene vs. summary, as well as description, narration, and dialogue. Students will read four to five short novels during the first half of the course and then participate in National Novel Writing Month, an international writing event. Students will additionally write synopses, outlines, character sketches, and search tirelessly for the novel's engine: its voice. Designed for any student who has always wanted to write a novel. Prerequisite: 90 or 91. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version¿¿is this what sets contemporary women writers apart? How can we understand the relation between the radically unprecedented material such writers explore and ¿the official version¿? What do we find compelling in their challenging of structure, style, chronology, character? Our reading- and writing-intensive seminar will dig into the ways women writers confront, appropriate, subvert, or re-imagine convention, investigating, for example, current debate about the value of ¿dislikable¿ or ¿angry¿ women characters and their impact on readers. While pursuing such issues, you'll write a variety of both essayistic and fictional responses, each of which is designed to complicate and enlarge your creative and critical responsiveness and to spark ideas for your final project. By affirming risk-taking and originality throughout our quarter, seminar conversation will support gains in your close-reading practice and in articulating your views, including respectful dissent, in lively discourse¿in short, skills highly useful in a writer¿s existence. Our texts will come from various genres, including short stories, novels, essays, blog posts, reviews, memoir.

Students will examine a diverse range of contemporary poetry. Students write and revise several poems that will develop into a larger poetic project. Prerequisite: 92. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Poetry Is Not a Luxury * These places of possibility within ourselves are dark... The titles of this course are words thought and dreamed by Audre Lorde in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (a version of which was first published in 1977). In this essay she writes: "For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare." In this course we will consider the powers, resuscitations, and strategies found in the texts of a constellation of contemporary Black poets whose work emerges out of Black feminist thought and practices. My hope is that we will together listen toward the possibilities of this work, and through experiments in reading and writing, realize some of what these texts make it possible for us to think and feel and write and be.

CPT course required for international students completing degree.Following internship work, students complete a research report outlining work activity, problems investigated, key results and follow-up projects. Meets the requirements for curricular practical training for students on F-1 visas. Student is responsible for arranging own internship and faculty sponsorship.

Overview of literary-critical methodologies, with a practical emphasis shaped by participants' current honors projects. Restricted to students in the English Honors Program.

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.

This course will introduce students to the field of Sound Studies (methodology, vocabulary, main claims) with a focus on the various sonic articulations of human-machine interactions in literature. The world of fiction as a sonic machine that articulates noise, sound, music, voice, or silence offers an excellent archive. We will read works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eça de Queirós, Mark Twain, the Italian Futurists, Zora Neale Hurston, and Luigi Pirandello. Secondary readings will include seminal contributions by R. Murray Schafer (the soundscape), Leo Marx (U.S. industrialization), Jacques Attali (noise and music), Mladen Dolar (philosophy and voice), Adriana Cavarero (gender, voice, and the body), Jonathan Crary (culture, aesthetics, and perception), Friedrich Kittler (media), and Daphne Brooks (black feminist sound).

The course elucidates sixteenth-century English poetry in a continental context. While narrative and discursive poetry will be explored, the emphasis is on lyric poetry, and the continuous focus is on generic experimentation from several distinctive standpoints: e.g. Petrarchism; the plain style; psalters, religious lyrics, and contrafacta; lyric sequences and other fictions of scale; and socially (but not necessarily poetically) marginal voices. Even where the course broaches conventional material, there will be an effort to redefine the questions that animate the field.

This course serves as the Core Seminar for the PhD Minor in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. It introduces students to a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy with literary and arts criticism. The seminar is intended for graduate students. It is suitable for theoretically ambitious students of literature and the arts, philosophers with interests in value theory, aesthetics, and topics in language and mind, and other students with strong interest in the psychological importance of engagement with the arts. In this year's installment, we will focus on issues about the nature of fiction, about the experience of appreciation and what it does for us, about the ethical consequences of imaginative fictions, and about different conceptions of the importance of the arts in life more broadly. May be repeated for credit.

This course will look at classic writings on cultures and subcultures, publics and counterpublics/"intimate publics," highbrow and lowbrow, both to map some basics about representations and corresponding cultural identities -- and to begin a practical project of inviting graduate students to research and write about contemporary subcultures after the transition to the internet.

Can the novel, as genre, be conceptualized or critically synthesized? This course will approach such a daunting question from its two necessary starting-points: fiction and theory. On the one hand, we'll take up several of those major novels that have so often been viewed as aesthetically foundational: most likely Don Quixote, Emma, Madame Bovary and The Brothers Karamazov. On the other hand, we'll read the major theoretical statements of Lukacs (Theory of the Novel, Studies in European Realism, The Historical Novel) and Bakhtin (The Dialogical Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), as well as text-specific criticism. This small group of texts might be seen as both necessary and insufficient to the largest questions of the genre. Our focus will be on closely reading and engaging each text in its inviting and demanding singularity and in building an open, imaginative and wide-ranging dialogue between fictions and theories. (This course might be followed by a class the next year on History and Theory of the Novel: Experiments, extending these questions in a number of further formal, geographic and chronological directions).

Computational approaches to fiction have given us a suite of new methods for understanding the role of space in literature. In this class, we will explore how the "spatial humanities" leverages these developments to aid us in identifying and exploring places within the imagined world of the novel. We will explore how named entity recognition and embedding spaces can be used to identify the places with the goal of extracting all place information, real or imaged, from a corpus of novels. We will also investigate visualization methods for spatial data (Geographic Information Systems/GIS, network theory) and study how a sense of space affords us new perspectives on the objects we study.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Required for first-year graduate students in English. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.

Required for first-year Ph.D students in English. Prerequisite for teaching required for 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.

A special subject of investigation under supervision of a member of the department. Thesis work is not registered under this number.

Students revise and develop a paper under the supervision of a faculty member with a view to possible publication.

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.

For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisors required. To enroll, make an appointment with English student services and provide confirmation of advisor consent.