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: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
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: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CV:
Creative Expression in Writing
Online workshop whose primary focus is to give 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: Sum
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 10A:
Introduction to English I: Medieval and Renaissance Literature
From the 14th to the 17th centuries, what are the relations between literature and history? How has our understanding of key works changed as historicisms--or the approach that treats a period in its specificity--have changed? Discussion of how literature works as a force in culture, not only a reflection of other forces. Chaucer's General Prologue and Knight's Tale; More, Utopia; Wyatt and Sidney, poems; Lock, Meditation of a Penitent Sinner; Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book One; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Donne, Songs and Sonets and Holy Sonnets; Milton, Paradise Lost.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 10C:
Introduction to English I: Tradition and Individuality, Medieval to Early Modern
This course offers a comprehensive introduction to English literature from its beginning in the medieval period to the early seventeenth century. We will study individual literary voices and styles in the context of a growing national tradition. We will discuss major authors (such as Chaucer, More, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Donne) and analyze representative literary works in a variety of genres, from the Old English elegy and Middle English lyrics to the Elizabethan sonnet, Renaissance comedy, and the allegorical epic. While the course equips students with specific analytical and interpretative tools necessary for a historical understanding of literature, it is equally committed to revealing the aesthetic interest that medieval and early modern literature still holds for the modern reader.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 10UK:
Lost in the Myths of Time
Robin Hood the Outlaw; Grendel, the monster of the moors; medieval battle-sites; early roadways: the remnants of medieval villages visible through Google Earth and cyber-visualization: this course will explore what ancient English landscapes and landmarks reveal about culture, society, politics, nation and identity a thousand years ago. (Mandatory for participants in the Lost in the Myths of Time Bing Overseas Seminar)
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 11AX:
Creative Writing: Short Fiction and Storytelling in the Arts
When we look closely at a photograph or painting, a story emerges, but how do we begin to interpret the meaning of that story without narration or passing time? When we listen to music or watch a ballet, we have a sense of emotion and drama, but why? And how has the artist created such things for us?<br><br> These questions have great resonance for the fiction writer, who must generate from the most basic tool all the necessities of the short story: drama, character, setting, emotion, and lyricism. In order to write more affecting and beautiful stories, this course will ask us to explore beyond the literary, into the world of the visual and performing arts. We will pair short stories with paintings, films, songs, and performances. As we learn the many ways stories are told and experienced, we will bring these insights into our own work through prompted exercises, improv, games, collaboration, workshop, and revision. In addition to exercises, vignettes, and sketches, each student will complete a short story and have that story critiqued by both her peers and the instructor. Our primary aim in this class will be to make writing a daily practice that considers the work and value of art generally and in that way to take risks, succeed, reflect, revise, fail, and recover from failure.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
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 11C:
Introduction to English II: Milton and Melville
This course will study four literary masterpieces in depth: John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667; 1674); Book 4 of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817); and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). All of these works are complex and will repay close study. But they also work their way into an ongoing literary conversation in the western world and in that sense serve as touchstones for later writers. We will consider each work not only for its own aesthetic accomplishment but also in sometimes passionate debate with its author's historical circumstances.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
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: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 12C:
Introduction to English III: Modern Literature
Survey of the major trends in literary history from 1850 to the present.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 14SC:
Three Versions of Hamlet
Shakespeare's Hamlet exists in three early editions published in 1603, 1604-05, and 1623. Nearly all modern editions conflate the three into a single text that includes famous or important speeches into a fourth version that would have been unrecognizable to Shakespeare's audience. For instance, the to be or not to be speech is utterly different across the three versions. This course asks what we learn about Shakespeare's play and the culture in which it was written and performed by treating the three versions as distinct texts with their own histories, purposes, and perhaps even world-views. The procedure of the course will be to read the three versions closely and, more often as we move through them, to note their variants and speculate about how these differences might inform a wide-ranging interpretation of Shakespeare's world. A few ancillary readings in textual studies, theater history, and Renaissance culture will cast light on the central questions.
Terms: Sum
| 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 Henry IV1, Henry IV2, Julius Caesar, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; the world premiere of Jiehae Park's Hannah and the Dread Gazebo; Universes' August Wilson's Poetry in UniSon; Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey; the world premiere of Randy Reinholz's Off the Rails; Disney's Beauty and the Beast, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice; and Shakespeare in Love, based on the screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. (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 21.nnNote: This seminar will convene in Ashland on Monday, September 4, and will adjourn to Stanford on Sunday, September 17. Students must arrive in Ashland by 4:00 p.m. on September 4. Room and board in Ashland and transportation to Stanford will be provided and paid for by the program.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
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 44B:
Contemporary British Fiction (ENGLISH 144B)
(English majors and others taking 5 units should register for 144B). How do contemporary British novelists represent dramatic changes in culture, class, demography, generation, economy, gender, race, and national identity following the allied victory in the Second World War (1939-1945)? Focusing on writers born between 1948 and 1975, we examine the structuring of historical consciousness in novels by Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and Hilary Mantel.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 50Q:
Life and Death of Words (CSRE 50Q, FEMGEN 50Q, LINGUIST 50Q, NATIVEAM 50Q)
In this course, we explore the world of words: their creation, evolution, borrowing, change, and death. Words are the key to understanding the culture and ideas of a people, and by tracing the biographies of words we are able to discern how the world was, is, and might be perceived and described. We trace how words are formed, and how they change in pronunciation, spelling, meaning, and usage over time. How does a word get into the dictionary? What do words reveal about status, class, region, and race? How is the language of men and women critiqued differently within our society? How does slang evolve? How do languages become endangered or die, and what is lost when they do? We will visit the Facebook Content Strategy Team and learn more about the role words play in shaping our online experiences. Together, the class will collect Stanford language and redesign the digital dictionary of the future. Trigger Warning: Some of the subject matter of this course is sensitive and may cause offense. Please consider this prior to enrolling in the course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
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 63N:
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare is the first literary writer to invent three-dimensional fictional human beings: characters who, in hearing themselves think, develop. With that premise in mind, we will explore two key dimensions of Shakespeare's originality: his poetic language and his genius for unfolding character. Above all, we will examine the extremities of the human condition-villainy, monstrosity, betrayal, seduction-in selected "problem plays" and tragedies.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
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.
Last offered: Winter 2016
| Units: 4
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 71:
Dangerous Ideas (ARTHIST 36, EALC 36, HISTORY 3D, MUSIC 36H, PHIL 36)
Ideas matter. Concepts such as equality, progress, and tradition have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like freedom of the press, fact versus fiction, and citizenship play an important role in contemporary debates in the United States. All of these ideas are contested, and they have a real power to change lives, for better and for worse. In this one-unit class we will examine these dangerous ideas. Each week, a faculty member from a different department in the humanities and arts will explore a concept that has shaped human experience across time and space. Some weeks will have short reading assignments, but you are not required to purchase any materials.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 76:
After the Apocalypse
What happens after the world, as we know it, has ended? In the course of examining classic and newer speculative fictional narratives detailing the ravages of various post-apocalyptic societies and the challenges those societies pose to the survivors, we explore several related questions: What is an apocalypse? What resources does speculative fiction offer for understanding and responding to oppressive societies? Where does the idea of the apocalypse originate? Is an apocalypse always in the future? Or has it already occurred? For whom might apocalypse constitute an ongoing present? In this course, we use the tools of close reading and historical criticism to build an archive of knowledge about the narrative, visual, and aural features of apocalypse. Students will be guided through the creation of a multimedia portfolio over the course of the quarter, for presentation at the end. No written midterm or final exam.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: 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 82N:
Thinking about Photographs
The course will begin with a short history of photography since the 19th century; followed by both a hands-on exploration of different types of photographs (possibly using the Cantor Collection) and then a more theoretical discussion of some of the acknowledged classics of photographic writing (Susan Sontag's On Photography, Roland Barthes' Camera lucida, Linfield's The Cruel Radiance.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 85N:
Financial Markets in Fiction and Film
The financial markets have been an enormously fruitful subject for fiction writers and filmmakers since the 17th century--but the financial crisis of 2008 has energized this interest again. We will study the literature (film, fiction, journalism) of the financial markets, and talk in great detail about moral, social, economic and political issues that such literature raises.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
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);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
Lee, C. (PI);
Petersen, K. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI)
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: Spr
| 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: ;
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Friedman, N. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Kletter, D. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Petersen, K. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Sharif, S. (PI)
ENGLISH 91DC:
Writing the Memoir
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
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 93Q:
The American Road Trip
From Whitman to Kerouac, Alec Soth to Georgia O¿Keeffe, the lure of travel has inspired many American artists to pack up their bags and hit the open road. In this course we will be exploring the art and literature of the great American road trip. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own personal projects, and considering a wide breadth of narrative approaches. Assignments will range from reading Cormac McCarthy¿s novel, The Road, to listening to Bob Dylan¿s album, ¿Highway 61 Revisited.¿ We will be looking at films like Badlands and Thelma and Louise,¿acquainting ourselves with contemporary photographers, going on a number of campus-wide field trips, and finishing the quarter with an actual road trip down the California coast. Anyone with a sense of adventure is welcome!
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
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 102E:
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Openings and Closings
This course, centered on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is first and foremost a class about beginnings and endings. To put the problem in its general form, we will be wondering where a literary text begins, and what it means for it to end. Chaucer's Canterbury is constantly ending and beginning again, starting anew as the tale-telling game breaks down, is interrupted, and recommences. We will also think about the Canterbury Tales as open and closed in terms of their material existence. What do the Canterbury Tales tell us about how we open or close a medieval manuscript or a digital text?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 103:
Riddles, Runes, and Other Old English Enigmas
What was English like before Shakespeare? Before Chaucer? In this class, you will learn to read Old English the ancestor of Modern English, spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons over a thousand years ago¿and in the process, you will begin to unravel the mysteries of the earliest English literature. These mysteries include riddles and other puzzles that have baffled readers for centuries, but they also include modern mysteries caused by damaged manuscripts and allusions to characters and texts now lost to the ages. We will encounter all of these enigmas (and many more) throughout the quarter as we read texts such as Widsith, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Wife¿s Lament, and The Husband¿s Message. For your final project, you will have the chance to interpret one of them and offer your own favorite solution.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 112A:
Humanities Core: Great Books, Big Ideas -- Europe, Medieval to Early Modern (DLCL 12, FRENCH 12)
This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? The second quarter focuses on the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, Europe's re-acquaintance with classical antiquity and its first contacts with the New World. Authors include Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Milton.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 115C:
Hamlet and the Critics (TAPS 151C)
Focus is on Shakespeare's Hamlet as 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 126B:
The Nineteenth Century Novel
A set of major works of art produced at the peak of the novel¿s centrality as a cultural form: Austen¿s Emma, Bronte¿s Wuthering Heights, Eliot¿s Middlemarch, Dickens¿s Great Expectations, Stevenson¿s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hardy¿s Tess of the d¿Urbervilles. The paradoxes of work, consciousness and the organization of narrative experience, habit and attention. Urban experience, shifting forms of individualism, ways of knowing other persons. Binary and concentric structures, happiness and moral action, arrays of characters.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
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: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 130:
Sex and the Novel (FEMGEN 130S)
How do novels represent sexual life? This course reads texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, and considers how novelists represent the discombobulating effects of desire in fictional prose. Authors may include: S. Richardson, N. Hawthorne, J. Austen, E. Brontë, G. Gissing, H. James, D.H. Lawrence, J. Joyce, V. Nabokov, J. Baldwin, A. Hollinghurst and Z. Smith.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 131B:
On the Road: American Travel Films
For more than a century, cars and cinema have occupied a romantic place in the American imagination, as vehicles that can take us someplace new, or engines for our fantasies of mobility, freedom and personal expression. Perhaps this is one reason why the road movie is one of the most enduring subgenres of twentieth-century film. In this class, we¿ll watch ten classic American travel films, one for each decade starting from Buster Keaton¿s silent Go West (1925) and arriving at Christopher Nolan¿s space epic Interstellar (2014). We thus begin on a train and end on a spaceship. In between we¿ll travel by car, bus, motorcycle and even on foot across America and beyond, in search of answers to the motivating questions for this course: what is the attraction of the open road, and how is the romance of its call embraced and challenged by the multiple genres of these films, the concerns of the decades in which they were produced, and the limits they impose on the idea of unrestricted travel, individual growth and independence.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 134A:
Historical Fiction: Bringing the Past to Life in Text and Film
How does the past come to life, on the page and on the screen? From Walter Scott, to Toni Morrison, to the popular romances, films, and television series of today, this course considers a range of texts that draw their settings, characters, and plots from history. We will examine how each work addresses some of the central tensions of historical fiction: between the imagined past and the past as reconstructed through research, between description and the spirit of the past, between accuracy and relevance. Our focus will be on the craft of historical fiction and the power of techniques like description, dialogue, setting, and character to reanimate the past. For the final assessment, students will choose between a traditional argumentative paper and a historical story of their own invention.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 136:
Great Poems: The Romantics
Major Romantic writers including William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 144:
Major Modernists: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot
What made modernism `new? Is the movement `evergreen? We examine representational change, narrative innovation, and political aesthetics in the poetry, short fiction, and novels of four iconic pioneers: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 144B:
Contemporary British Fiction (ENGLISH 44B)
(English majors and others taking 5 units should register for 144B). How do contemporary British novelists represent dramatic changes in culture, class, demography, generation, economy, gender, race, and national identity following the allied victory in the Second World War (1939-1945)? Focusing on writers born between 1948 and 1975, we examine the structuring of historical consciousness in novels by Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and Hilary Mantel.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
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 146A:
Steinbeck (AMSTUD 146A)
Introduction to the work of an American writer, beloved by general readers, often reviled by critics, whose career spanned from the Great Depression through World War II to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Focus on the social and political contexts of Steinbeck's major works; his fascination with California and Mexico; his interdisciplinary interest in marine biology and in philosophy; his diverse experiments with literary form, including drama and film.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 146C:
Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald (AMSTUD 146C)
While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Hurston and Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. Focus on the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in representing the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 147A:
Speaking of Baseball (AMSTUD 147A)
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, baseball has been steeped in lore and rhetoric. A cultural commentator recently pegged it one of three significant American contributions to world culture, along with jazz and the U.S. constitution. Literary and artistic representations of baseball abound, often treating it as more than a game and only a little less than a religion. In this class, we¹ll track representations and grand claims made for baseball by American poets, novelists, and commentators of all sorts. We'll weigh the cornucopia of literary nonfiction depicting the game. The goal will be to map the scope of this literature, defining a tradition's edges, determining its peaks, assessing its limits, challenges, and stakes. This class is open to anyone, whether familiar with the game, or totally new to it. We'll cover a variety of issues: Americana, mythologies of sport, gender and class, race, history, sociology, lots of poetry, and film.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 150A:
Great Poems: Modern and Contemporary
Ten weeks, twenty-four poets, as follows: The Ache of the Modern: Hardy and Hopkins; The Making of Irish Modernism: W. B. Yeats; American Romanticism: Whitman and Dickinson; American Modernism: Frost and Stevens; Transatlantic Modernism: Eliot and Auden; Imagism: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D.; Sappho's Sisters: Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich; Poetry and Madness: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton; Harlem Renaissance and Poets of Color: Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott; The Indomitable Irishry: Heaney, Muldoon, Boland.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 150D:
Women Poets (FEMGEN 150D)
The development of women's poetry from the 17th to the 20th century. How these poets challenge and enhance the canon, amending and expanding ideas of tone, voice and craft, while revising societal expectations of the poet's identity. Poets include Katharine Philips, Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 150E:
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: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 150J:
Queer Poetry in America (AMSTUD 150J, FEMGEN 150J)
Some poets are known for portraying alternative sexualities in their poetry. Others seem to cover sexuality up. Can we use a poem to determine whether a poet is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning? Or do some poets simply defy categorization? What makes a poem queer? Is poetry somehow more or less queer than other literary forms? Even if we can answer these questions, what would they tell us about literature in general? This course will investigate such topics and more by tracking queer poetry in twentieth-century America. We'll start with nineteenth-century figures Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, then move on to Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and others. We'll ask what their poetry meant in their own times, as well as what it means to us in our present era of expanding civil rights and changing sexual attitudes.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 152G:
Harlem Renaissance and Modernism
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 153:
Time, Space, and Place: Humanistic Inquiry in a Digital Age
What are the digital humanities? A definition might be: Digital humanities are those pursuits which use digital tools to explore topics of humanistic inquiry. But that definition is rather general. To have a more nuanced understanding of the digital humanities, students will be exposed to a number of its practices, and practitioners. Active engagement by all participants is expected. Students will read and annotate, map and perform digital textual analysis. Ultimately, students will have a better idea of what the digital humanities are, and will be introduced to different ways they can be practiced, opening up possibilities for further exploration.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 153H:
The Text in the Machine: Digital Approaches to Literature
Whether you¿re an avid programmer and an equally avid science fiction reader or an English major who designs apps in her spare time, you¿ve probably had some experience switching between literary and technological modes of thinking, between following a story and debugging a script. What if these distinct cognitive styles could be combined? In this course, we will try to learn things about narratives by counting, clustering, and networking their contents, exploring the burgeoning field of digital humanities. We will practice some basic techniques of quantitative textual analysis, from identifying a text¿s most distinctive words to determining its favorite topics and themes. But we will also find that these technical questions point us back to more basic interpretive or even philosophical ones: what is an author? What is a character? When we have a sense of a poem¿s mood, what exactly are we responding to? When we feel suspense or anxiety while reading a story, how is the text creating that effect?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 156B:
Yvor Winters: Poetry and Criticism
Yvor Winters¿s poetry and fiction spanned several important eras: Renaissance poetry, American and French Symbolism, Imagism, and what he called ¿Post Symbolism.¿ In this course we will cover a good deal of literary history through the works of Winters, the fiction and poetry of his wife, Janet Lewis, and a variety of poems that touched on their work, including American Indian songs, Japanese haiku, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Catherine Davis, J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, and N Scott Momaday. Among our concerns will be ways of addressing a wide variety of poetic styles.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 157F:
The Experience of Narrative: Serial Storytelling in Print and on TV
¿TV¿s Lost Weekends,¿ a recent headline calls them, referring to our modern habit of binge-watching television shows. Today¿s commentators debate the right way to watch TV and, as they do, they echo longstanding arguments about how to read books. This course juxtaposes contemporary television with novels from the last 150 years in order to explore different ways of experiencing longform narratives. Primary examples will most likely be Dickens¿s Bleak House, The Wire Season 1, Conrad¿s Lord Jim, and True Detective Season 1.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
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. To review the full list of WISE seminars, please visit this link: https://english.stanford.edu/courses/2016-2017-english-162w.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
| 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: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 166:
Who were the Vikings?
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.
Last offered: Summer 2016
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
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: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 172E:
The Literature of the Americas (AMSTUD 142, COMPLIT 142, CSRE 142)
A wide-ranging overview of the literatures of the Americas 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
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.
Last offered: Spring 2016
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 175E:
Animals and the Fictions of Identity (AMSTUD 175E)
In a post-Darwin world, the notion that we might all have an animal alter-ego lurking inside seems quite familiar. But ideas about animals¿how they think and feel, act and react¿involve identity categories such as race, gender, class and ability in surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animality and human life in twentieth-century American fiction, from race and indigeneity in Jack London¿s dog stories to the storytelling practices of contemporary animal advocacy groups. The course may also include an experiential component in which students will have the opportunity to explore multispecies concerns with a local organization.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
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.
Last offered: Spring 2016
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 179D:
Empire and Revolution: Joseph Conrad and Ngugi wa Thiong'o (AFRICAAM 179D)
This class juxtaposes the works of two landmark experimental novelists: Joseph Conrad, one of the first major modernist writers of the early 20th century; and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the first East African novelist published in English and a leading voice of political activism in Kenya. Novels will include, among others, Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Nostromo; Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 180B:
Reading Politics: The History and Future of Literacy
Reading is a political act. Through our major texts of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Zora Neale Hurston¿s The Eatonville Anthology, and Azar Nafisi¿s Reading Lolita in Tehran, we will explore the classed, racialized, and gendered power dynamics of literacy and literature. How can books incite social revolutions? How can they maintain harmful inequalities? When is reading a tool of empowerment and when is it a tool of social control? We will examine these questions in a number of contexts, ranging from Victorian London, to the Jim Crow American South, from the Islamic revolution in Iran to a Silicon Valley proliferating with new forms of scientific, technological, and financial literacy. The course includes a significant service learning component, in which students will volunteer to tutor underprivileged readers through Bay Area literacy programs. Final projects will ask students to reflect on these tutoring experiences and consider the complex politics at work in the act of teaching someone to read.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 181C:
Shakespeare and Dickens
An exploration in the problems and stakes of reading two central but historically-separated authors through one another. How theatrical are Dickens's novels and how much can we understand the theatrical, in Dickens, as a working-through of Shakespeare? How do the elements of performance manifest themselves in both? What substitutes for the role of "narrator" in Shakespearean drama? How can we understand these two authors as both paradigms of "national" writing -- defining normative British culture -- and as fundamentally eccentric?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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 183E:
Self-Impersonation: Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir (COMPLIT 183)
Course will examine the intersecting genres of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Topics will include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.); the role of language in the development of the self; the relational nature of the self (vis-à-vis the family, "society," God); the cultural status of "individuality"; the concept of childhood; and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of family, religious and national history.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 184:
The Novel, the Global South (COMPLIT 123, DLCL 143)
Literary inventiveness and social significance of novelistic forms from the Great Depression to the present. The seminar will focus on texts by William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Junot Diaz.
Terms: Spr
| 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 184C:
Data and Knowledge in the Humanities
How do different disciplines understand and use data, and how do skills such as interpretation and critical thought work with data to create knowledge? The introduction of mathematics reshaped disciplines like cosmology and sociology in the past while, in the present, the humanities are facing the same challenges with the emergence of fields such as spatial history and the digital humanities. In this class we will study how the introduction of data has transformed the way that we create knowledge.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| 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: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-AQR
ENGLISH 186:
Tales of Three Cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles (AMSTUD 186)
How urban form and experience shape literary texts and how literary texts participate in the creation of place, through the literature of three American cities as they ascended to cultural and iconographical prominence: New York in the early to mid 19th century; Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and Los Angeles in the mid to late 20th century.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 186B:
The American Underground: Crime and the Criminal in American Literature
The literary representation of crime and the criminal from postrevolutionary through contemporary American literature. Topics will include the enigma of the criminal personality; varieties of crime, from those underwritten by religious or ethical principle to those produced by the deformations of bias; the impact on narrative form of the challenge of narrating crime; and the significance attributed to gratuitous crime in the American cultural context.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ENGLISH 187G:
Queer Lives: LGBT Memoirs of the Past 100 Years
The course will examine LGBT autobiographical writing from roughly 1900 to the present. The focus will be on how Gay and Lesbian writers have adapted to longstanding cultural disapproval and the stigmatizing, often bitter constraints of the "Closet." We will also examine what happens to the memoir form when social taboos against homosexuality (and/or transgenderism) come to be relaxed or overturned--as has been the case in many western societies in the new millennium.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 187S:
Literature, Film, and Adaptation (AMSTUD 187S)
This course studies many aspects of translating fiction into film, written media into visual and written. Topics include short story into feature film: Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, into Sarah Polly's Away from Her ; conventional police procedural into post-WWII Japanese hybrid of procedural and film noir: Ed McBain's King's Ransom into Kurosawa's High and Low which deals with changing standards of Japanese business, class issues, the effects of the American atomic bomb; classic southern gothic horror novel (Davis Grubb's Night of the Hunter) into Charles Laughton's American expressionist masterpiece; complete revision of Dorothy B. Hughes novel into Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (Humphrey Bogart); Philip K. Dick and the various interpretations of Blade Runner.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 189:
Literature of Adoption (ENGLISH 289, TAPS 189, TAPS 289C)
From Sophocles to Barfield, adoption has been at the center of Western literature. This course will explore adoption as both plot point as as symbolic structure for meaning-making in myth and fiction. While this course will not count as Creative Expression, final projects can be creative and/or scholarly.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 189D:
Literature and Science
Classic literary and scientific works by writers such as Darwin, Thomas Hardy, Einstein, and Virginia Woolf. Considers how literature assays the consequences and potential of scientific theories within the subtle orderings of narrative, how a scientific theory is developed through and precipitated in language, and how novelists and scientists think outside the accumulated meanings of their time. Attends to their shared methods and preoccupations, including rendering visible the invisible; the idea of the generally significant individual; changing models of the shape of history; the contours of experiment; the cult and culture of experience and the dream of objectivity; regulative and investigatory fictions. Some discussion of literature and medicine.
Terms: Spr
| 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, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190D:
Dialogue Writing
For Fiction and Film students. Study how dialogue develops character, reveals information, moves plots forward, and creates tension. Use of short story, novels, graphic novels, and films. Students will write many short assignments, one dialogue scene, and one longer story or script (10-20pages). Priority to Fiction Into Film students, but open to all. Prerequisite: 90.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
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
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 190G:
The Graphic Novel
Interdisciplinary. Evolution, subject matter, form, conventions, possibilities, and future of the graphic novel genre. Guest lectures. Collaborative creation of a graphic novel by a team of writers, illustrators, and designers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190H:
The Graphic Novel
Continuation of English 190G. Interdisciplinary. Evolution, subject matter, form, conventions, possibilities, and future of the graphic novel genre. Guest lectures. Collaborative creation of a graphic novel by a team of writers, illustrators, and designers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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
4 times
(up to 20 units total)
ENGLISH 190V:
Reading for Writers
Taught by the Stein Visiting Fiction Writer. Prerequisite: 90 or 91
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 191:
Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
Continuation of 91. Workshop. The application of advanced storytelling techniques to fact-based personal narratives, emphasizing organic writing, discovering audience, and publication. Guest lecturers, collaborative writing, and publication of the final project in print, audio, or web formats. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 191T:
Special Topics in Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
Workshop. Continuation of 91. Focus is on forms of the essay. Works from across time and nationality for their craft and technique; experimentation with writing exercises. Students read and respond to each other's longer nonfiction projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| 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: 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, 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: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192V:
The Occasions of Poetry
Taught by the Mohr Visiting Poet. Prerequisite: 92. Permission number required to enroll.
Terms: Win
| 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 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: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Antopol, M. (PI);
Boland, E. (PI);
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Dybek, S. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Friedman, N. (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);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
Marra, A. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Petersen, K. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Sharif, S. (PI);
Shewmaker, M. (PI);
Soileau, S. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Walser, H. (PI);
Wolff, T. (PI);
Wrenn, G. (PI);
Ablaza, C. (GP)
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, Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 199:
Senior Independent Essay
Open, with department approval, to seniors majoring in non-Honors English who wish to work throughout the year on a 10,000 word critical or scholarly essay. Applicants submit a sample of their expository prose, proposed topic, and bibliography to the Director of Undergraduate Studies before preregistration in May of the junior year. Each student accepted is responsible for finding a department faculty adviser. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 201:
The Bible and Literature
Differences in translations of the Bible into English. Recognizing and interpreting biblical allusion in texts from the medieval to modern periods. Readings from the Bible and from British, Canadian, American, and African American, and African literature in English.
Terms: 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.
Last offered: Winter 2016
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 234G:
Literature and Empire (HISTORY 234G, HISTORY 334G)
This course will explore the relationship between modern British literature and imperialism. We will attend to the way imperialism shaped the evolution of a range of styles and genres, from romantic to gothic to modern, epistolary to mystery to fantasy. We will read works by authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, complementing them with key works of literary criticism.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
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 244:
101 YEARS OF LONDON
101 Years of London juxtaposes older representations of the UK's capital city (from Defoe, Dickens, Woolf and others) with contemporary accounts (from Zadie Smith, Ian McEwen and others). We will also look at films, painting, photography and websites about London.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 255:
Speaking Medieval: Germanic Vernaculars and their Remains (GERMAN 255)
This class presents a survey of medieval German vernaculars and their documentation in manuscripts and on material objects. The languages include Gothic, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old English, and Old High German. Readings will include runic inscriptions, magic charms, proverbs and riddles, apocalyptic visions, heroic lays, and sermons and prayers. (This course must be taken for a letter grade and a minimum of 3 units to satisfy a Ways requirement.)nPlease note this course meets MW 1:30-2:50 and is taught by Professors Kathryn Starkey and Elaine Treharne.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 256:
Postwar US Poetry: The New Americans and Beyond
This course will examine influential American poetry of the postwar period, taking as its starting point the poets included in Donald Allen¿s landmark anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. After a reading of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School poets found there, we will probe the limits of Allen¿s selection, considering figures proximate to the New Americans or influenced by them. Topics to be discussed will include the relationship between New American poetry and its modernist predecessors, the status of poetic form, and the connection between these literary movements and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 289:
Literature of Adoption (ENGLISH 189, TAPS 189, TAPS 289C)
From Sophocles to Barfield, adoption has been at the center of Western literature. This course will explore adoption as both plot point as as symbolic structure for meaning-making in myth and fiction. While this course will not count as Creative Expression, final projects can be creative and/or scholarly.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
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: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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: Aut
| Units: 4
ENGLISH 300C:
Introduction to Manuscript Studies
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 303D:
Thinking in Fiction (COMPLIT 303D)
Narrative and cognition in 18th-century fictional, philosophical, scientific, and cultural texts. Probable readings: Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Swift, Defoe, Hume, Lennox, Sterne, Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, and Bentham.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 304H:
Romanticism: The Visionary Company
Coverage of the major Romantic poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats) in cultural, historical, and book-historical context.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 308B:
Gilded Age American Literature
Introduction to the creative innovations and the political tensions that stemmed from the formation of a multicultural society during the age of industrialization. We will attempt to place literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, while also surveying recent critical and theoretical developments in areas such as Realism, Naturalism, Regionalism, Minority and Race Studies, and so on.
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 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 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: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 345G:
Modeling the Post45 Literary Field: Forms, Frames, Contexts, Themes
Exploration of various post45 literary phenomena with special attention to broader conceptual models in and by which they might be interpreted.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 353:
Digital Aesthetics
In this course we will explore the intersection between Digital Humanities and aesthetic theory. Although quantitative analysis is frequently called reductive when it comes to the study of text, we will study how computational methods can help nuance or expand our understanding of aesthetic phenomenon. In addition to studying the background theories to operationalize, much of our time will be spent learning computational methods with which to analyze text. No prior experience with programming or digital humanities methods is required.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 363D:
Feminist Theory: Thinking Through/With/About the Gendered Body (FEMGEN 363D)
Organized around a series of case studies, this graduate feminist theory course will consider issues related to the complex relationship between sex, gender, sexuality, biological reproduction, violence, and social power. It is a core course for the PhD minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Enrollment is limited to PhD-level students.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 365A:
Forms of Selfhood and Subjectivity in Early America, 1630-1800
Exploration of the formation of models of selfhood and subjectivity, both individual and corporate, in colonial through postrevolutionary America Readings encompass literary and non-literary expressive forms. Categories of selfhood and subjectivity drawn from political, religious, social, and metaphysical thought, including the concepts of sainthood and election; republican and democratic subjectivity; the now-competing, now-contiguous notions of inherent right and conscience; and the processes of conversion and secularization. Current theoretical attempts to frame the subject, predominantly the work of Foucault on the hermeneutics of subjectivity.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 373C:
Text of Shakespeare
Shakespeare through textual history: where do our texts of Shakespeare come from, and how has editorial practice transformed them over the centuries? The course will focus on Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 375:
Henry James
Major and minor works, with a focus on the later style.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 379B:
Novels of Virginia Woolf
We will read all the major Woolf novels: The Voyage Out, Jacob¿s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and Between the Acts---with additional reading from her essays and letters. Considerable attention will be paid to Woolf's family history, the evolution of her pioneering literary style, her views on sexuality, women, and society, and her complex personal relationships with other members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group (Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington, Katherine Mansfield, et al.).
Terms: Aut
| 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.
Last offered: Winter 2016
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 389:
What was (is?) Modernism?
An introduction to modernism, focusing on the novel. Modernist studies has been eager to explore various axes of ¿expansion¿¿geographic (beyond Europe), temporal (beyond the early twentieth century), and cultural (across the divide between ¿high¿ and ¿low¿ realms of culture). The class will focus both on familiar modernist such as James, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; we¿ll also look at case studies of potential forms of expansion (temporal: James Baldwin; geographic: Mulk Raj Anand; and others); secondary sources will focus on recent developments that stretch the boundaries of the field of modernist studies.
Terms: Aut
| 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: ;
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Phelan, P. (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: Spr
| 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);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (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);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI);
Kuida, M. (GP)
