311 - 320 of 388 results for: ENGLISH

Creation and exile, the divine and the human, angels and devils, the revolutions of human history, gender division and sexual identity, prophecy and apocalypse: these timeless themes occur in the sacred texts (mainly from the Hebrew canon of the Bible) and in the illuminated poetry of William Blake on which this seminar will focus. Emphasis will be given to form and genre proverbs, songs, lamentations, dream visions, prophecies, histories, fables - as well as to forging connections between texts and concepts.

This course will introduce students to the field of Sound Studies (methodology, vocabulary, main claims) with a focus on the various sonic articulations of human-machine interactions in literature. The world of fiction as a sonic machine that articulates noise, sound, music, voice, or silence offers an excellent archive. We will read works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eça de Queirós, Mark Twain, the Italian Futurists, Zora Neale Hurston, and Luigi Pirandello. Secondary readings will include seminal contributions by R. Murray Schafer (the soundscape), Leo Marx (U.S. industrialization), Jacques Attali (noise and music), Mladen Dolar (philosophy and voice), Adriana Cavarero (gender, voice, and the body), Jonathan Crary (culture, aesthetics, and perception), Friedrich Kittler (media), and Daphne Brooks (black feminist sound).

This course is open to graduate students only: What do literary works and artworks do for readers? Do readers use them to excite, calm, stabilize, or change themselves? How do we consider literature and the arts, as forms, from the point of view of 'the audience?' What happens if we consider literature as 'media?' Taking stock of previous theories of reception, reader response, audience research, history of the book, and media new and old, how shall we think about literature within the 'system of the arts' in the digital age?

According to the Russian formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, the American short story was not part of a transition to the novel but , the one fundamental and self-contained genre in American prose fiction, a parallel, self-contained, and developing tradition if anything more centrally located in the culture than the novel. Why then has short story theory and criticism fared so poorly in relation to that on the novel? We will face this question by exploring the emergence and development of the short story from the early nineteenth century, in authors ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Jhumpa Lahiri, emphasizing critical/theoretical readings, and with a focus on the relation between the short story and the contexts of its appearance (magazines, anthologies, collections, cycles, Creative Writing programs, the Internet, etc)."

This course considers historical changes in daily life, as practices and everyday ethics as well as ideas and rhetoric, to conceptualize the large-scale meanings of modernity and modernization, from roughly 1600 to the present. Beginning with a series of major thinkers from the mid-20th century Norbert Elias, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu we will assess the compatibility of their accounts of modern changes to domains they call, variously, habitus, interdependence, power, action, work, labor, and life. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to these theories. The second half will consider recent work in literary history, social and cultural history, gender and sexual theory, which has attempted to demarcate and explain a number of revolutions in human practices located in different historical moments and phases of the ongoing modernizing process: an affective revolution, humanitarian revolution, rights revolution, sex-gender and sexual revolutions, towards revolutions, too, of practices concerning nonhuman entities and statistical or aggregated visions of humanity. Though oriented to literary-historical knowledge, reading will be heavily historical and social-scientific; students are expected to absorb and respect the disciplinary and methodological canons of various disciplines, and graduate students from outside literature will be welcomed. This course is for graduate students only.

This 1-unit course meets weekly to discuss research by members of the Stanford community and invited visitors working at the intersection of computational methods and the humanities. Each session highlights innovative methodologies, offering insights into various topics (i.e.: text analysis, digital archiving, data visualization, network analysis). The class fosters collaboration, providing a valuable platform for learning and advancing scholarship in the digital age. Open to all graduate students (and advanced undergraduate, with permission) with an interest in digital humanities.

Introduction to the creative innovations and the political tensions that stemmed from the formation of a multicultural society during the age of industrialization. We will attempt to place literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, while also surveying recent critical and theoretical developments in areas such as Realism, Naturalism, Regionalism, Minority and Race Studies, and so on.

This course considers the role creativity plays in addressing ecological collapse. Through the primary lens of ecopoetry and climate fiction, students explore how cultural works document planetary change and reflect our evolving relationships with animals, natural resources, weather, and the concept of "nature." Can the practice of writing itself change the way we see the world and integrate ideas? Together, we'll survey how creative expression opens pathways and challenges conventional approaches to scientific knowledge and communication. To quote the visionary bell hooks, "The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is - it's to imagine what is possible." We will venture outdoors for inspiration, visit land-based sculptures on campus, and engage with exhibits at the Cantor Arts Center.  Students will gain a foundation in essential writing techniques while exploring diverse aesthetics and experiential perspectives. They will consider not only the stories they choose to tell but also the significance of the forms and materials they use. Journal prompts - including imitations, guided free-writes, and critical responses - encourage students to experiment with new ways of seeing, imagining, and problem-solving. They will develop three pieces of writing over the course of the quarter, refined with the support of workshop feedback. Undergraduate and Co-term students, regardless of major, are encouraged to apply; no prior experience is required.

The emergence of a transatlantic and transpacific culture in the early modern period. How is the Renaissance of Europe and England fashioned in a conversation with the cultural forms and material realities of the colonial Americas? And how do colonial writings expand and complicate the available understanding of the Renaissance? Readings in More, Hakluyt, Lery, Spenser, Camoes, Erauso, Shakespeare, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.