151 - 160 of 246 results for: Literary history

In this course, we will read major British literary works of the age of empire to explore the relationship between imperialism and modern literature. We will attend to the way imperialism shaped the evolution of a range of genres, from romantic to gothic to mystery to the spy novel, fantasy, and modernism, reading works by authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Agatha Christie, and others. This course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Mondays you meet in your own course, and on Wednesdays all the HumCore seminars (in session that quarter) meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

At a basic level, history is the study of change over time. But the modern discipline of history, as it was formed during the Enlightenment, radically changed conceptions of time itself: from something at times understood as cyclical or directionless to something linear and teleological. Modern history then prompted further reconceptualizations of time: Capitalism introduced new ways of valuing time; the Darwinian revolution introduced a new scale of earthly time; the world wars dented faith in the idea that time passed in the direction of progress; and now climate change has altered conceptions of time in a new way. This course examines evolving understandings of the medium of the historian's craft: what is time? We will examine poetic, scientific, literary, and geographical conceptions of time and trace time's modern history: how colonialism and capitalism produced new experiences of time, and anticolonial and anticapitalist critiques of those experiences. Throughout, we will consider how this history should shape the way historians think about change over time, in terms of questions of scale, human experience, and disciplinary purpose.

This course examines the history of evolutionary biology from its emergence around the middle of the eighteenth century. We will consider the continual engagement of evolutionary theories of life with a larger, transforming context: philosophical, political, social, economic, institutional, aesthetic, artistic, literary. Our goal will be to achieve a historically rich and nuanced understanding of how evolutionary thinking about life has developed to its current form.

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?

This interdisciplinary course examines the evolution of letter-writing practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France through the lens of a media revolution, and highlights the historical roots of contemporary media issues. We will read primary sources such as epistolary manuals, letters by notable early modern letter writers (Sévigné, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great), and epistolary novels, as well as secondary scholarship from the fields of cultural history, literary studies, and media studies. Topics include, but are not limited to, innovations to the postal system, the rise of social norms of letter writing, image management, the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment, social activism through letter writing, the birth of media celebrities, surveillance, and privacy. Readings and discussions in English.

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.

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.

How did images maintain, construct, or transform political power during the conquest and colonization of Mexico? The creation and destruction of visual materials in this period had a complicated relationship with power. The pictographic codices that celebrated the expansive Aztec Empire were created after its fall; and the conquistadors' indigenous allies painted some of the most triumphalist narratives of the conquest. Friars accused indigenous peoples of "idolatry" both to justify the destruction of their images and objects, and to construct legal defenses of their humanity. Colonial authorities frequently claimed Afro-Catholic festivals were seditious. In light of such complexity, official histories that recount the top-down consolidation of royal and viceroyal power are suspiciously simple. What counter-narratives do images and other visual phenomena from this tumultuous period offer? This course introduces students to major texts from Colonial Mexico (royal chronicles, conquistadors' tales, letters, poems, festival accounts) alongside a fascinating trove of images (painted codices with Nahuatl texts, feather mosaics, and indigenous heraldry) and considers how experiences of images and spectacles were transformed into textual accounts ("ekphrasis" or the literary device of description). Taught in Spanish with accommodations for non-ILAC students who are still improving their language skills

Focuses on political regimes, transregional connections, economic interactions and sociocultural formations in the early modern Islamic Afro-Eurasia. Topics include complex political-economic systems of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires and expansion of Turco-Persianate political and literary cultures across the Post-Mongolian Eurasia; experiences of various Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindu, as well as urban, rural and nomadic communities and networks under Islamicate political regimes; consolidation of transregional commerce and cultural exchange with the proliferation of networks of merchants, scholars and sufis; new tendencies in knowledge, individual, gender, family, social order, and religion; incorporation of the Islamic world in the global economy; Muslims in the age of revolutions; political and social reforms and consolidation of Muslim internationalism in the age of imperialism.