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"Beowulf" is the first great English epic--a tale of heroes, monsters, and the futility of conflict. It influenced the "Lord of the Rings", but was described as a 'featureless heap of gangrened elephant's sputum' by novelist Kingsley Amis. It exists in one early eleventh-century manuscript plus countless editions, translations, films, comic books and, now, a fully digitized e-manuscript. We shall experience manifold instances of "Beowulf" and ask what, then, is the 'text' of "Beowulf"? What constitutes the 'real' poem? Can we reclaim an 'original' work of art and should that even be part of the scholarly endeavor?

Fiction Workshop for Graduate Students. No prerequisites or previous workshop experience required. For graduate students from all fields, this workshop encourages exploration of diverse experiences through fiction.

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.

An introduction to the essential tool-kit for medievalists, this course will give all medievalists a great head start in knowing how to access and interpret major works and topics in the field. Stanford's medieval faculty will explain the key sources and methods in the major disciplines from History to Religion, French to Arabic, English to Chinese, and Art History to German and Music. In so doing, students will be introduced to the breadth and interdisciplinary potential of Medieval Studies. A workshop devoted to Digital Technologies and Codicology/Palaeography will offer elementary training in these fundamental skills.

The forward thrust of modernity in Romantic-period Britain bred a fetishization of the past. Ballads on mermen translated from the Danish, the historical landscapes of Sir Walter Scott, epic inspired by the Elgin marbles, the minstrelsy of the Scottish border and ¿reliques¿ of early English poetry, irreverent treatises on old books, gastronomical writing on ancient food theory, and conversational essays on the genealogy of all things, were all aspects of the phenomenon of antiquarianism to be explored in this course.

How does writing help healing? What is the connection between the 'feel of a sentence' and the 'feel of a body'? Why do we love Oliver Sacks' work and why are doctors asked to read novels?

A survey of 20th-century theory with focus on the concept of culture and methods of studying it from diverse disciplines including, anthropology, historical sociology, literary and cultural studies. Discussions will emphasize modernization, transmodernization and globalization processes in their relations to culture broadly understood, cultures in their regional, national and diasporic manifestations, and cultures as internally differentiated (high and low culture, subcultures, media cultures).

This course examines the Gothic as a both a narrative subgenre and an aesthetic mode, since its 18th century invention. Starting with different narrative genres of Gothic expression such as the Gothic novel, the ghost tale, and the fantastic tale by writers such as Walpole, Radcliffe, Sade, Poe, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the course goes on to ask how the Gothic sensibility permeates a wide range of 19th century cultural phenomena that explore the dark side of Enlightenment, from Romantic poetry and art to melodrama, feuilleton novels, popular spectacles like the wax museum and the morgue. If time permits, we will also ask how the Gothic is updated into our present in popular novels and cinema. Critical readings will examine both the psychology of the Gothic sensibility and its social context, and might be drawn from theorists such as Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Zizek.

The purpose of this course is to trace the articulation of a new symbolic order in political-theoretical and literary texts written in the Anglo-American 1790s. Course content will be framed by the creation of the Bill of Rights (ratified in 1791) and the evisceration of the First Amendment in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the first instance of what historian Richard J. Hofstader famously called "the paranoid style in American politics." We will explore the 1790s through 1) an examination of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates concerning the pros and cons of establishing a national government rather than a confederation of states; 2) the range of American and British responses to the French Revolution; 3) the growth of democratic radicalism in Anglo-America; 4) the fear of radical-democratic infiltration of the United States from the European Continent, Ireland, and Haiti; and 5) the American literary expression of these questions written in the late 1790s, on the cusp of the post-revolutionary and "early national" eras. Our overall goal is to gain a historical understanding of the overlapping cultural contexts for American ¿republicanism,¿ ¿democracy,¿ and ¿liberalism,¿ and the evolution of their meanings. We will focus particularly on the co-production of democratic and novelistic subjectivity in relation to natural right theory, the evolution of "conscience," voice, the body, individuation, sovereignty, representation, equality, and freedom.