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This seminar investigates literature as a practice of freedom, taking as its theoretical foundation Richard Rorty's revolutionary claim that human liberation comes not through discovering truth but through redescription. For Rorty, literature's unique power lies in its capacity to provide new vocabularies, metaphors, and narratives that allow us to reimagine ourselves and our possibilities. By showing us that our deepest assumptions about identity, society, and meaning are contingent rather than necessary, literature opens spaces for transformation - both personal and collective. Through intensive engagement with contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Miranda July - we will explore how literary redescription works in practice. These writers demonstrate how reimagining the languages we use to narrate experience can fundamentally alter what that experience can become. Their innovations in form and voice reveal writing as a tool for escaping what Rorty calls our "final vocabularies," those inherited descriptions that ordinarily constrain our sense of the possible. We will examine how their work challenges conventional boundaries between fiction and philosophy, self and other, private and public, creating new modes of attention and understanding. The course situates Rorty's pragmatist vision of literature within a broader philosophical conversation about freedom, drawing on Nietzsche's perspectivism, Heidegger's poetics of dwelling, and Arendt's conception of narrative identity. Together, these thinkers help us understand how literary redescription operates as ethical and political practice: not by prescribing how we should live, but by expanding our imaginative resources for conceiving how we might live. Through close reading and creative response, students will engage with literature as a liberating force - one that doesn't reveal hidden truths but creates new possibilities for human flourishing.

Computational approaches to fiction have given us a suite of new methods for understanding the role of space in literature. In this class, we will explore how the "spatial humanities" leverages these developments to aid us in identifying and exploring places within the imagined world of the novel. We will explore how named entity recognition and embedding spaces can be used to identify the places with the goal of extracting all place information, real or imaged, from a corpus of novels. We will also investigate visualization methods for spatial data (Geographic Information Systems/GIS, network theory) and study how a sense of space affords us new perspectives on the objects we study.

An introduction to modernism, focusing on the novel. Modernist studies has been eager to explore various axes of expansion, geographic (beyond Europe), temporal (beyond the early twentieth century), and cultural (across the divide between "high" and "low" realms of culture). The class will focus both on familiar modernist such as James, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; we'll also look at case studies of potential forms of expansion (temporal: James Baldwin; geographic: Mulk Raj Anand; and others); secondary sources will focus on recent developments that stretch the boundaries of the field of modernist studies.

Open to Stegner Fellows in the Creative Writing Program only. May be repeated for credit.

Open to Stegner Fellows in the Creative Writing Program only. May be repeated for credit.

Preparation for first-year Ph.D. qualifying examination and third year Ph.D. oral exam.

CPT course required for international students completing degree. Following internship work, students complete a research report outlining work activity, problems investigated, key results and follow-up projects. Meets the requirements for curricular practical training for students on F-1 visas. Student is responsible for arranging own internship and faculty sponsorship.

Required for first-year graduate students in English. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.

Required for first-year Ph.D students in English. Prerequisite for teaching required for Ph.D. students in English and Modern Thought and Literature. Preparation to enter professional educational practice as a Stanford TA in the department of English, including developing knowledge of how people learn, especially how college students learn, familiarity with the Stanford English Undergraduate curriculum and knowledge of English Literature curricular goals, and the fundamentals of teaching practice, including research-based practices for classroom management of discussion sections, for assessment, for teaching diverse learners, and for the ongoing analysis and improvement of one's own teaching. Emphasizes the development of pedagogical content knowledge in English and the development of a teaching philosophy as such.