171 - 180 of 387 results for: ENGLISH

Throughout the 20th century, writers in the United States of America produced an unprecedentedly large, diverse, and transformative body of literature. Authors, editors, and publishers began anthologizing this material early in the century, often aiming to introduce new communities of writers - including those marginalized because of their race, gender, or sexuality - to U.S. readers. As a result, anthologies became important to the lives and literature of a wide range of major 20th century U.S. authors, including EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE, HILDA "H.D." DOOLITTLE., WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, LANGSTON HUGHES, ZORA NEAL HURSTON, RICHARD WRIGHT, ALLEN GINSBERG, ADRIENNE RICH, AMIRI BARAKA, FRANK O'HARA, JACK KEROUAC, AUDRE LORDE, CARLOS BULOSAN, FRANK CHIN, GLORIA ANZALDÚA, BERNADETTE MAYER, LESLIE MARMON SILKO, LOUISE ERDRICH, MICHAEL CHABON, CLAUDIA RANKINE AND MANY, MANY MORE., Students in this course will have the opportunity to read all of these authors and others, and in doing so will construct a concrete, comprehensive, and cutting-edge understanding of how U.S. literature developed over the course of the 20th century.

Black literature and media have long served as important sites of ecological thought and as blueprints for resistance to the combined matrices of imperialism, racialized dispossession, and extractivism. In exploring key works by Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, adrienne maree brown, Julie Dash, and others, we will unpack and complicate the idea of the human, and prioritize intersectional approaches to thinking with the violence of climate catastrophe. In so doing, we will approach ecology as both subject and method, and investigate possibilities for radically other futures outside the entrapments of racial capitalism and environmental degradation. While our course texts index the disastrous effects of racial capitalism and accompanying ecocide, they also chart different modes of thinking-living-acting where "Black livingness" (McKittrick) is a central aspect of ecology.

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version," is this what sets contemporary women writers apart? How can we understand the relation between the radically unprecedented material such writers explore and 'the official version'? What do we find compelling in their challenging of structure, style, chronology, character? Our reading- and writing-intensive seminar will dig into the ways women writers confront, appropriate, subvert, or re-imagine convention, investigating, for example, current debate about the value of 'dislikable' or 'angry' women characters and their impact on readers. While pursuing such issues, you'll write a variety of both essayistic and fictional responses, each of which is designed to complicate and enlarge your creative and critical responsiveness and to spark ideas for your final project. By affirming risk-taking and originality throughout our quarter, seminar conversation will support gains in your close-reading practice and in articulating your views, including respectful dissent, in lively discourse - in short, skills highly useful in a writer's existence. Our texts will come from various genres, including short stories, novels, essays, blog posts, reviews, memoir.

Get Out. Black Panther. Lovecraft Country. From the gothic to the galactic, Black artists, writers, and filmmakers are revolutionizing sci-fi, horror, and fantasy on the page and screen. In this course, we will explore how Black creators harness supernatural, speculative, and fantastical modes of storytelling to reinterpret the past and dream up possible futures. Relying on frameworks like Gothic Blackness, Afrofuturism, and Black Quantum Futurisms as our guide, we'll time-travel through the Black speculative imaginary, moving from the cyberpunk dystopia of Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer to the haunted university halls in Mariama Diallo's Master. As we decode each text's approach to race, power, and resistance, we'll uncover how the Black Fantastic doesn't just reimagine genre conventions and tropes; it fundamentally challenges our understanding of time, space, and reality. Join us as we investigate how Black horror, science fiction, and fantasy excavate the past, confront the present, and imagine liberatory futures. Course texts include NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Mariama Diallo's Master, Nnedi Okorafor's Binti, and Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer.

In this seminar, we will take a deep dive into the creation of debut books. You will come away from the course with an expansive sense of what goes into crafting a first novel or short story collection, from its earliest ideas to a fully realized book. Reading some of the most exciting contemporary fiction -- including work by Jhumpa Lahiri, Gish Jen and Gary Shteyngart -- we will examine each work as a model for inspiration and imitation. Through weekly writing prompts and in-depth discussions, we will explore and practice how writers build nuanced and multi-dimensional characters, sharp and believable dialogue, sustained suspense and other techniques essential to writing powerful fiction. Some weeks authors will visit the class, giving us the unique chance to analyze their work with them, and to learn about the craft and life of a working fiction writer. Fulfills short story literature requirement for the Minor in Creative Writing and the Creative Writing Emphasis in the English Major.

This class will serve a twofold function. It will introduce students to a basic, aesthetic understanding of the short story form. This will involve weekly reading of masterful examples of the form, in-depth discussion of the stories and how they work, and workshop critiques of student work. Over the course of the quarter we will also consider the place of Native fiction within the larger tradition, and how it works, the ways it is the similar and the ways it might be different, and of course how different Native writers have dealt with the set of problems specific to them both as citizens of tribal nations and as artists who must consider and respond to the pressures and expectations typical to colonized peoples. By the close of the course students will have gained a foundational vocabulary and aesthetic perspective that will allow them to reflect on the short story form, and move forward as writer should they feel so inclined. Note: While this course will at times take a POV that allows for discussions particular to Native peoples, it is not an explicitly political course. This class will greatly benefit anyone who wants to begin their training in the discipline of fiction. Note: Students will not be allowed to join this class after the first week of the quarter

A seminar focused on the short story as a genre, beginning with myths and legends of the pre-modern world, to the split between realism and romanticism in the nineteenth century, then through some of the major figures and modes of the twentieth century (naturalism, modernism, domestic, magical, "dirty" and other forms of realism, identity and multiculturalism, etc). Writing will include interpretive story annotations and creative work in various genres, culminating in a final research-based paper or your own short story.

Exploration of classic (mostly) and contemporary short stories emphasizing craft aspects useful to writers and looking closely at how Chekhov, Kafka, Woolf, Flaubert, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Munro, and others evoke emotion. Fulfills short story literature requirement for the Minor in Creative Writing and the Creative Writing Emphasis in the English Major. Admission by consent of instructor.

In our era of anthropogenic climate change, the need for more effective methods for understanding the interaction and impact of humans with/on the oceans has never been more urgent. This innovative new course introduces students to the forefront of interdisciplinary work on ocean systems involving the humanities/science integration. This integration is the least explored among all the areas of interdisciplinary study of the oceans, which has much more prominently featured social science/policy/science issues. Our course will introduce methods for pursuing this timely integration under the guidance of Oceans Department Chair Fiorenza Micheli and English Department Professor Margaret Cohen. In the first 5 weeks of the course we will look at selections from influential case studies in such integration around shared archives of interest. Our examples include writer John Steinbeck and marine scientist Ed Rickett's co-authored Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), Stephen Palumbi and Carolybn Sotka's Death and Life of Monterey Bay and ongoing collaborations at Stanford. Students taking the course for 3 credits will attend one day of a workshop on Feb. 7, 2025 bringing leading figures in ocean humanities and ocean sciences to discuss paths forward. In Weeks 7-10, students will work in teams, ideally built of collaborators with differing types of area expertise, identifying a question of interest both to humanities and science researchers and exploring paths forward. This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units and a letter grade to be eligible for Ways credit.