1 - 10 of 246 results for: Literary history

This course will provide a tour of Paris through its material culture and cultural practices. Each week's topic will be a window into different aspects of the city. We will use 10 selected places and objects to explore the city's cosmopolitan present and its rich historical past. The weekly offerings will also have accompanying literary French texts and artistic examples to ground them in French cultural production. By the end of the course students will gain a layered understanding of Paris and its reputation as a capital of world style and culture. Examples will include exploring the Seine as a site of art, commerce and intellectual life but also for the history of various cultural settlements along the river on the Left and the Right banks of the city. The week on Food Culture will allow us to examine the cafe as a venue of leisure and intellectual debate and the "epiciers" and "boulangeries" as the anchors of neighborhood nutritive values and social life, while the week on Le Metro will immerse us in public advertising, murals, and sounds in Paris's famous underground transport system. These and other sites will provide animated sources for understanding the historical beauty, cultural complexity, and sheer resonance of Paris both for denizens and its many visitors.

This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connections between the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This course will help students improve their ability to speak and write in French by introducing students to linguistic and conceptual tools to conduct literary and visual analysis. While analyzing novels and films, students will be exposed to a diverse number of topics such as national and cultural identity, race and class, gender and sexuality, orality and textuality, transnationalism and migration, colonialism and decolonization, history and memory, and the politics of language. Readings include the works of writers and filmmakers such as Aim Csaire, Albert Memmi, Ousmane Sembne, Lela Sebbar, Mariama B, Maryse Cond, Dany Laferrire, Mati Diop, and special guest 'onora Miano. Taught in French. Students are encouraged to complete FRENLANG 124 or successfully test above this level through the Language Center. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.

This interdisciplinary course examines the strange and strained relationship between art and empathy. Cultivating empathy is often invoked as a worthwhile moral purpose for engaging art, literature, and the humanities in general. This course explores (and explodes) this assumption while studying the history of empathy as both a moral and aesthetic concept as it evolves appears from the Enlightenment period to the current moment. How do artworks and literature enhance our understanding of empathy or activate our suspicions of it as a moral idea? How does empathy as an aesthetic concept that theorizes how bodily experiences can be projected onto others help us rethink new modes of belonging and more critical modes of reflecting? This course engages texts from across various disciplines such as art history, literary criticism, medical humanities, dance criticism and philosophy to analyze how ideas circulating around the term "empathy" have generated questions concerning the nature of healing, learning/teaching, and political mobilizing. We will think about these various theoretical ideas by placing them in conversation with literature and art that emerged from writers and artists from the Black diaspora. As a moral and political idea, empathy has been stridently critiqued by various theorists in Black Studies as a moral shortcut that undercuts political engagement. We will think about how these disparate ideas and critiques of empathy can open conversations onto the ways art and literature activate our embodied, cognitive, and affective participation with the objects we share together.

This course investigates the relationship between culture, revolutionary decolonization, and post-colonial trajectories. It probes the multilayered development of 20th and 21st-century African literature amid decolonization and Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives and the debates they generated about African literary aesthetics, African languages, the production of history, and the role of the intellectual. We will journey through national cultural movements, international congresses, and pan-African festivals to explore the following questions: What role did writers and artists play in shaping the discourse of revolutionary decolonization throughout the continent and in the diaspora? How have literary texts, films, and works of African cultural thought shaped and engaged with concepts such as "African unity" and "African cultural renaissance"? How have these notions influenced the imaginaries of post-independence nations, engendered new subjectivities, and impacted gender and generational dynamics? How did the ways of knowing and modes of writing promoted and developed in these contexts shape African futures?

From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama and Beyonce, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography, and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American culture.

More enslaved people from Africa were forced to Brazil than any other country and Brazil was the last country to abolish the practice of slavery in the Americas. How do these two facts impact the cultural history of Brazil? This class engages these questions to explore the origins, development, and centrality of Afro-Brazilian culture. We will explore musical genres ranging from samba to Brazilian pop (MPB) and rap, and study literary and artistic expressions from an anti-racist perspective to gain a fuller picture of Brazilian society today. Taught in English.

This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will read academic articles, book chapters, and exhibition materials in the fields of literary criticism, history, anthropology, gender studies, and fine art that trace Black Women's and gender expansive people's experiences across the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of this course is to aid graduate students in growing as theorists in their own fields by engaging with the methodologies and terms present in contemporary Black queer and gender studies. We will also learn to conduct historical scholarship via archival sources. Particular attention will be paid to scholarship published in the past decade, especially as it relates to performance, literary criticism, and expansive gender throughout the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.This course is by application only. Please send a statement of interest and your CV to mlrosa@stanford.edu.

This course explores the long history of ideas about gender and equality. Each week we read, dissect, compare, and critique a set of primary historical documents (political and literary) from around the world, moving from the 15th century to the present. We tease out changing arguments about education, the body, sexuality, violence, labor, politics, and the very meaning of gender, and we place feminist critics within national and global political contexts.

What do pictures reveal about individuals and their social, cultural, and historical world? Who or what might they conceal? This seminar uses visual depictions of Americans (paintings, photographs, films, comics, and more) as the starting point for discussions of American history, art, popular culture, social movements, and national identity, as well as questions of who has been represented and who has been overlooked. Literary and historical texts support and complement the close study of pictures from the late 19th century through the present.