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This research unit looks at Comics from a transnational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. Each quarter we organize a series of lectures, reading sessions, and workshops around a main topic. This year we plan on exploring topics such as Environmentalism (Fall 2025), Sci-Fi (Winter 2025), and Early Comic History (Spring 2025). Some previous topics that we have explored are: Postcolonialism and Decoloniality, Feminism, Superheroes, Manga, Computer Science, and Comic Theory. We meet three times per quarter on Zoom or in-person. To earn the unit, students must attend all events hosted during the quarter, do the readings in advance of the meeting, and participate actively in the class discussions.

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.

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

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

In a recent column on A.I. chatbots, Ezra Klein writes that their "'thinking,' for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human" (The New York Times, March 12, 2023). Implicit in Klein's argument is the assumption that we do understand human thinking, or at least how to recognize it, and that A.I. confronts us with something radically different masquerading as the familiar. But perhaps the world has long been populated by different kinds of thinkers. That appears to be the claim of a number of critics working on poetry, who posit that poems are their own kinds of thinking machines, with the ability to represent a speaker's thinking, to facilitate a reader's thinking, to formulate the structure of thinking, or even to think for themselves. In this course, we'll examine such claims by close reading poems from a range of writers while also engaging works of criticism that grapple with these questions from formalist, phenomenological, and philosophical perspectives. We'll ask what it might mean to say that poems think and whether they can help us think about thinking in general, including in the context of recent developments in A.I. technology. We'll also consider our own role as thinkers and writers in a world in which the practices of thinking and writing are changing faster than ever before. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact judithr@stanford.edu.)

What makes a narrative "Gothic"? One defining feature is the way the past seeps into the present, whether as ghosts, crumbling castles, or even old letters left behind for future readers. Across centuries, we see these tropes again and again, reimagined so that each new story is different but, at the same time, seems to remember and respond to the Gothic stories that came before it. This course will explore the relationships that Gothic texts have to each other. What can Frankenstein, with its multiple narrators, show us about how narratives pass from person to person? How does the contemporary bestseller Mexican Gothic address the colonial histories beneath older Romantic and Victorian narratives? And why might one turn a ghost story by Henry James from the end of the 19th century into a 21st-century Netflix series? In all of these cases, the Gothic effects of "haunted reading" allow the past's hidden ghosts and monstrous meanings to emerge, visibly changed and seeking attention. As we consider how old reading can influence or even "haunt" the new, we will reflect on our own reading habits in both personal and academic contexts while simultaneously investigating how intertextuality and adaptation relate to our own critical writing and original interpretations. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact judithr@stanford.edu.)

What does it mean for a text to be "realistic" or "unrealistic"? Why does it feel natural to us, as readers, to evaluate a book based on its ability to represent "reality"? Then again, why attempt to reproduce the real when you could simply put the book down and walk outside? In this course, we will consider these questions through the lens of "the romance." Though extremely variable across time, the romance emerges time and again as the genre of the unreal or decidedly fictional. Here are the books, we are told, that lead to fantasy and self-delusion. Reexamining such judgments, we will read a selection of "romances" - ranging from saints' lives to lesbian pulp fiction and the contemporary romance novel - while also devoting attention to the romance-reader (as a supposedly deluded and ineffectual participant in reality) to explore the development of the novel as a category and to trouble our understandings of "real" and "unreal" modes of experience and representation. How has the romance historically been used to reject, distort, or transform reality? What gender - or other - biases inform the perennial devaluation of the romance as escapist fluff? What might it mean? What insights into literary history and politics emerge? if we take the romance and its readers seriously? (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

In this seminar, we delve into foundational topics in Shakespearean drama, Shakespeare Studies, and literary theory by reading key plays alongside touchstone analyses drawn from the major critical schools of the twentieth century. Each class pairs dramatic verse with academic argument, introducing theatrical characters alongside prominent scholars. Primary texts include Hamlet, As You Like It, and Richard III. Secondary works survey historicist, psychoanalytic, new critical, post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives, among others. By the end of the quarter, students will have expanded their understanding of Shakespeare and of literary criticism and will have developed their competencies as critics in their own rights. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu)

Gothic and horror novels may stand as the haunted houses of literature. But in this course we turn our spotlight onto the smaller corners and crevices in which the ghostly and the monstrous often dwell: short stories. How does short fiction create atmospheres of terror and tension so quickly? And, what tropes and biases do these texts rely upon as a kind of shorthand to create discomfort? Exploring such questions through Gothic and horror tales from the 18th century to the present, we will attend to matters of literary form and medium, while also chasing after the haunting social, racial, and gender issues these texts raise. Considerations of who is painted as Other in tales of terror will underpin our discussions of such topics as sexism, the abject, and Orientalism, among others. Primary texts will include works by Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, John Polidori, Flannery O'Connor, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Nnedi Okorafor, and more. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)