101 - 110 of 246 results for: Literary history

This course offers students an introduction to queer and narrative theory through an exploration works by queer and feminist American writers affiliated with the San Francisco-based, late twentieth-century "New Narrative" movement - an artistic group notable for literary experimentation that utilized collage and multi-modality to depict queer life and culture. Selected authors and texts will include Robert Gluck's Jack the Modernist, Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, and Alison Mills Newman's Francisco, alongside supplementary core secondary readings in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Through these works, we will examine the crucial role that textual innovation and print played within the history of queer culture in California. Because of the course content's ties to the Bay Area, students will also be able to take facilitated trips to independent press archives and art galleries affiliated with the New Narrative movement and queer publishing today. We will also be visiting Stanford's own print shop, where students will be able to practice hands-on approach to thinking about how print, form, and queer expression inform each other. Assignments will include a paper grounded in close-reading, as well as an option to submit either a traditional final paper, or a final portfolio and artist's statement that allows students to explore the possibilities of form, material, and experimental narrative on their own.

As weapons, the pen and the sword have been used to wound, punish, and condemn as well as to protect, liberate, and elevate. Historically entangled with ideals of heroism, nobility, and civility, the pen and the sword have been the privileged instruments of men. Yet, throughout history, women have picked up the pen and the sword in defense, despair, and outrage as well as with passion, vision, and inspiration. This course is dedicated to them, and to study of works on love, sex, and power that articulate female experience. In our readings and seminars, we will encounter real and fictive women in their own words and in narrations and depictions by others from classical antiquity to the present, with a special focus on the Renaissance and on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Touching on such topics as flattery and slander through the study of misogynistic, protofeminist, and feminist works in the early modern and modern periods in various European literary traditions, we will consider questions of truth and falsehood in fiction and in life. Course materials span a variety genres and media, from poetry, letters, dialogues, public lectures, treatises, short stories, and drama to painting, sculpture, music, and film works regarded for their aesthetic, intellectual, religious, social, and political value and impact.

Over the last several decades, there has been an astounding proliferation of trans literature, while debates over trans people's rights to exist have taken centerstage in the U.S. political landscape. Literature plays a foundational role in the formations of trans identities and histories, and trans identities and histories invite us to consider the conventions of literary storytelling anew. The time has come to ask: what kinds of trans stories can we tell, and how? In this introductory undergraduate seminar, we will read trans texts from different genres, including novels, short stories, case studies, poetry, graphic novels as well as film and music to think about trans experiences, embodiments, transitions, and histories. We will read trans literature from various places and times in order to ask how gender, sexuality, race, desire, place, and history shape and are shaped by works of trans literature in a global context. No prior knowledge of trans studies is required for participation in this course.

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.

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 seminar serves as an introduction to media theory by turning to the sea as a medium. Designed for third- and fourth-year German majors, the course explores the way the ocean has served as a constant vehicle for poetic and philosophical reflection throughout history, from Homer's Odyssey to Paul Valery's Cemetery by the Sea. Combining theoretical studies of seafaring by Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Siegert with literary writings from Franz Kafka and Friedrich Hölderlin, this course highlights the way nautical activity becomes a theater of political and poetic concerns when our engagement with the ocean is viewed as a metaphor or a cultural technique. In recent years, the sea has also become a flashpoint for environmental concerns due to rising sea levels, leading to calls to take the material status of the ocean itself seriously. The sea, when viewed through the lens of environmental media, continues to serve as a canvas for the projection of human hopes and fears while opening up further questions about the relationship between nature, cultural practices, and theoretical texts. Readings for this course will be in German and English.

The Global Gateway course explores the history of Paris through its artistic and literary production from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. In this course, students will trace the cultural, artistic, political, infrastructural, and commercial changes over three centuries that made Paris, for a time, the capital of the modern world. Beginning with the Enlightenment, the course asks what aspects of Paris and its cultures of sociability were conducive to such knowledge production. Moving into the nineteenth century, students will examine how Paris became a main character in literature, as writers grappled with urbanization, industrialization, and the modernization of a city in transformation - whether by revolution, Haussmann's renovation of Paris, or commercial innovation with the birth of the department stores or "grands magasins." Finally, the course concludes with a reflection on significant eras of artistic production in Paris, from the Belle Époque to surrealism, World War II and the Occupation, Americans in Paris, postwar art and literature, and classic French cinema. In this course, students will engage with a rich variety of literary texts, secondary sources, and film. Students will also have the opportunity to work with materials in Special Collections from the Roxane Debuisson Collection on Paris History, including rare maps, commercial ephemera, photographs, postcards, billheads, and more. Readings may include texts by authors such as Mercier, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, George Sand, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Breton, Gertrude Stein, and Barthes. Course taught in English.

France, the land of laïcité and the epicenter of the Enlightenment and of Existentialism, has played a central role in the development of modern western atheism. Its philosophical and literary traditions - traditions in which the line between philosophy and literary writing is often blurred - are rich with discussions of the causes and consequences of atheism. From the seventeenth century, when atheism first emerged as a serious possibility, through to the present day, in which the French population is among the most atheist in the world, the trajectory of French history has been profoundly marked by the rejection of religion. In this course we will focus on texts that foreground questions about what it is like to be an atheist. If one abandons faith in any deity, what does it mean to exist in this universe and in society? What are the moral, psychological and existential implications of disbelief? How does the atheist face death? How does the atheist deal with religion and those who are religious? How has the experience of atheism evolved over time? This course will be taught in French.

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.