91 - 100 of 246 results for: Literary history

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?

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.

A survey of US literature told through the history of an important, complex, and neglected genre, the short story cycle, ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's incomplete The Story Teller to Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011). Other authors include Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and Louise Erdrich. An introduction to the patterns of American literary development, its social and cultural contexts, and the major critical/theoretical lenses through which it has been understood. We will consider the unique formal qualities of the story cycle: its liminal status between novel and story collection, its vacillation between unity and multiplicity, connection and disconnection, in relation to broader American questions of identity and community.

What is Utopia and why does it generate so many different versions of itself, including, most powerfully, negations of itself as dystopia? As a vision of human perfectibility, Utopian literature has from its inception in Thomas More's Utopia (1517) been concerned with the social nature of humanity. It is always therefore political in nature. Almost exactly contemporaneous with the defining moments of the modern era (the conquest of the Americas, Machiavelli and modern politics, the emergence of modern literature in Cervantes, Luther and modern consciousness, printing and the beginning of the modern public sphere), Utopia is also unavoidably a product of the literary and imaginary worlds. Concerned with the development of Utopian and anti-Utopian thinking in the modern world, we will see how issues of science and technology, race and sexuality, freedom and determination, and salvation and apocalypse are embedded in the history of utopian literature and contemporary science fiction. Why did the modern world develop as it did? Can we imagine alternative worlds and histories? As future-oriented thinking, how does utopian literature offer possibilities for a better life? As a forum for future thinking Utopia also offers a platform for thinking anew the working of race and racial formations as well as constructions of gender in the contexts of what has been called "the Subject of Utopia." This course addresses the poetics and generative power of classic Utopian forms to examine how differing aesthetics as well as differing conceptions of history are linked fundamentally to the possibility of reshaping conceptions of race and gender in sustainable future orientations. Concerned with understanding how the traditional forms of the novel are altered in the context of the contemporary drive to represent a new stage in global and hemispheric race relations as well as by the forces of global climate change and the imperatives of decolonization, our readings will investigate how contemporary versions of literary realism change to represent the experiences of the crises of our time and the need to imagine alternative futures.

Human history is one of diasporas collective and individual, and representations of exile both literary and theoretical are as various as the phenomenon of exile itself: statelessness, homelessness, as well as a state of mind Edward Said called metaphorical exile and Georg Lukacs called transcendental homelessness. In this course, we will examine novelistic, autobiographical and theoretical accounts of the experience of exile.

What are we to make of the fact that individual literary texts always come to us as instances of larger generic forms? Why have some texts been thought more "generic" than others? Reading some key texts in the history of genre theory, this class will ponder these questions with specific reference to the modern novel.

Important works from the Western tradition will be used to construct and explore some basic frameworks for ethical thinking. Students will gain a familiarity with some canonical texts and develop skills of close-reading and group discussion when it comes to ethical inquiry. Course texts can vary by quarter and year but will include a mix of canonical philosophical, religious, and literary texts. NOTE: Former SLE students should sign up for the ETHICSOC 22A/ ETHICSOC 22B listings. SLE 22A/ SLE 22B are courses in ethics for high school students, taught primarily through an history based humanities curriculum. Stanford Student's participation in this course will include classroom experience with the high school students, as well as time with the course instructors to discuss, evaluate, and reflect on the course design. Please contact the instructor if you'd like to learn more: gwatkins@stanford.edu

Important works from the Western tradition will be used to construct and explore some basic frameworks for ethical thinking. Students will gain a familiarity with some canonical texts and develop skills of close-reading and group discussion when it comes to ethical inquiry. Course texts can vary by quarter and year but will include a mix of canonical philosophical, religious, and literary texts. NOTE: Former SLE students should sign up for the ETHICSOC 22A/ ETHICSOC 22B listings. SLE 22A/ SLE 22B are courses in ethics for high school students, taught primarily through an history based humanities curriculum. Stanford Student's participation in this course will include classroom experience with the high school students, as well as time with the course instructors to discuss, evaluate, and reflect on the course design. Please contact the instructor if you'd like to learn more: gwatkins@stanford.edu

This course offers an initiation into queer and trans history across premodern Europe and the Mediterranean (1000 BCE to 1850 CE). How do historians think about and bring to light the rich diversity of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past? How can historical methods help unearth the pluralities of sex, gender and sexuality before modern sciences and laws imposed the uniform categories that we know today? How do we study queerness and transness before they were "invented" by the medical and institutional discourses of psychoanalysis and sexology rising from the 1850s on? This course focuses on examples and concepts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages and the ways in which they became key references in the early modern era for various forms of gender and sexuality non-conformity. Throughout the quarter, students will work with primary sources - literary works, legislative and judicial documents, theological and medical treatises, maps, images, and material artifacts - and mobilize different methods to do and bring to light queer and trans history.