61 - 70 of 388 results for: ENGLISH

Animals have always appealed to the human imagination. This course provides basic a rubric for analyzing a variety of animal poems in order (1) to make you better readers of poetry and (2) to examine some of the most pressing philosophical questions that have been raised in the growing field of animal studies. The animals that concern us here are not allegorical-the serpent as evil, the fox as cunning, the dove as a figure for love. Rather, they are creatures that, in their stubborn animality, provoke the imagination of the poet.

In 1968, Stanley Kurick's 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined the future in the then distant year of 2001. Now that year is more than 20 years in the rearview and his science fiction future is now our past (with fewer PanAm flights to the moon and a stunning dearth of murderous AI). What is science fiction in the 21st century? What does it do? Who writes it? And, importantly, who is it for? In this class we will explore the questions of topic, author, audience, and community through the lens of the Hugo winning short stories since 2001. Hugo Awards are chosen by the fans, so this will allow us to examine the ways in which fandom and popular culture have changed in the last two decades in ways that has made the genre broader and more inclusive of writers and readers of every gender, race, and sexuality, while at the same time provoking a reactionary response in a minority of writers and fans who consider themselves decentered by these developments. Readings will include the Hugo winning short stories, some classic science fiction stories, and contemporary reports about the annual science fiction convention where these awards are given (WorldCon), and articles about science fiction fan culture. We will also view some of the science fiction visual works that have been important or influential in the past two decades. Timing and health permitted we will attend a local science fiction convention. This course will be reading- and writing-intensive but will also offer opportunities for spirited discussion. We will be engaging with sensitive subjects such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Assignments include weekly short essays, discussion leadership, individual presentations, and a final research paper.

We have a textual history of London that dates from at least the 1st century BCE, and archaeological evidence of settlement that is even older. For millennia, the city of London has been both a place of textual production and itself the focus of authors' writings. The metropolis has been at the forefront of innovation in the human record (the first printing press in Britain was established in London; the first acoustic telephone, the first computer program, and the first wind-up radio were invented there); it is a space where new languages, new technologies of information, and new stories of the human experience have evolved. This course explores the genesis and long history of the city of London through text, image, and sound. We'll investigate inscribed wooden tablets that predate the Roman invasion of Britain; the manuscripts, printed texts, and performances of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; the emergence of musical innovators, like the Beatles and David Bowie; and the awareness of the city's history in contemporary authors' works, like Zadie Smith's The Wife of Willesden. Through these and other primary sources, students will explore the great city of London and its contribution to global text technologies, designing their own text technological study. We'll focus on literary and historical archives, art, sound and image recordings, and the idea of the `city as author', and, circumstances permitting, we'll visit the Huntington Library in Pasadena, as well as working in Stanford University Libraries and the Hoover Archives.

Fluid, ever changing, fresh and quick, love is the stuff of imagination. Who can define it? This course will begin where Shakespeare begins his career as a playwright with The Comedy of Errors. We then intersperse the reading of Shakespeare's sonnets (nos. 1-154) three comedies in which love figures as a principal theme: Love's Labor's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, and All's Well That Ends Well. The final three weeks will be devoted to different kinds of love as they appear in the Henry sequence. Against the stately backdrop of history, we will examine the betrayed love of Sir John Falstaff for Prince Hal, the lighthearted banter of the knight and Mistress Quickly, Henry V's wooing of Catherine of Valois.

Freaked out, excited, overwhelmed or even secretly a little bored with all the breathless hype and handwringing over artificial intelligence? Wondering what it all means - if anything - for you? Our class takes a playful but serious look at AI in terms of your own life, studies, and eventually career. Whether your current interests lean towards STEM or the humanities, this seminar draws on both theory and practice to explore how AI is impacting nearly all aspects of our public and private lives. We will be exploring intersections of STEM, arts and humanities scholarship and practice that engage with these exponentially impactful technologies. Of special interest are the social ethical and artistic implications of artificial intelligence systems with an emphasis on aesthetics, civic society and racial justice, including scholarship on decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries. So just what has art got to do with it? Cultural narratives shape the public imagination about these exponentially sophisticated technologies, the rapid development of which is already outpacing traditional ethical and governance protocols. Storytelling impacts, implicitly or explicitly, everything from product design to public policy, influencing how people understand identity (racial, sexual, even what counts as "human"), how they interact socially (or not), and how they think a healthcare or justice system should work (e.g. issues with AI chatbots in therapeutic and clinical settings, privacy and data scraping, copyright, name-image-likeness compensation, facial recognition bias, predictive sentencing, et al.). Too often contemporary narratives about technology range in tenor from the apocalyptic (The Doomsday Argument) to the salvific (To Save Everything. Click Here). Yet there are so many more ways of seeing and experiencing the world beyond the sometimes very limited perspectives of mid-20th century science fiction that inform many technologists' visions. Engaging with arts theorists and practitioners from disciplines, backgrounds, and time periods, our class together explores some fresh plotlines, images, tropes, identity formations, historiographies and speculative futurities. We will examine both AI-generated art as well as arts' take on AI. Art may challenge the Silicon Valley start-up mentality of "size, speed, scale, quantification" but AI is also challenging the professional art world status quo, challenging aesthetic norms and valuation (what counts as 'art,' what counts as 'good' art? Even who/what can make art?) What is the impact of art on health and well-being, the new neuroscience about the "brain on art"? We will bring the study and practice of the arts in the broadest sense (literature, theatre, performance, film, music, media, visual and graphic art) to advance our understanding of the 'human' in human-centered AI... (see complete course description at soco.stanford.edu.)

Nothing is harder than being funny on purpose. We often associate humor with lightness, and sometimes that's appropriate, but humor is inextricably interlinked with pain and anger, and our funniest moments often spring from our deepest wounds. Humor can also allow us a platform for rage and indignation when other forms of rhetoric feel inadequate. This workshop will take students through the techniques and aesthetics of humor writing, in a variety of forms, and the main product of the quarter will be to submit for workshop a sustained piece of humor writing.

This class looks at three master poets, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Rainer Maria Rilke, closely reading some of their most famous short lyrics, to think about the essence of poetic utterance, how words gain power when put in near-magical incantatory sequence, and what we contribute as readers and literary critics.

What remnants of the world's cultures will future generations be able to discover and decipher, and how will they interpret the monuments, documents, languages, and sites that remain? How will they access the technologies we have created for making our way through the world? What has been the environmental impact of human culture? Why should we preserve human cultural remains? How do encounters with the past inform our future? This IntroSem takes a humanistic perspective on sustainability, viewing the human record as a resource and exploring how it might be sustained in an ethical and meaningful way.

In this poetry workshop, we will spend the first half of the quarter reading and writing in traditional forms and the second half innovating from those forms. When discussing poetry, what do we mean when we talk about craft? What is prosody and why is it important? What are the relationships between form and content? What does a modern sonnet look like? We will consider how a writer might honor a tradition without being confined by it. The culmination of the course will be a project in which the student invents (and writes in) a form of their own. All interested students are welcome beginners and experts alike.