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Ideas matter. Concepts such as race, progress, and equality have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like gender identity, universal basic income, and historical memory play an important role in contemporary debates in the United States. All of these ideas are contested, and they have a real power to change lives, for better and for worse. In this one-unit class we will examine these dangerous ideas. Each week, a faculty member from a different department in the humanities and arts will explore a concept that has shaped human experience across time and space. Some weeks will have short reading assignments, but you are not required to purchase any materials.

"TV's Lost Weekends," a recent headline says, referring to the modern habit of binge-watching television shows. Such news stories debate the right way to watch TV. They also echo longstanding arguments about how to read books. This course juxtaposes contemporary television with classic serial novels in order to explore different ways of experiencing longform narratives. How do we read or watch when we're forced to wait before the next episode---or, conversely, given the opportunity to binge?

How and why did the short story take root and flourish in an American context? Early works of classic American literature read alongside stories by women and minority writers, stretching from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary period.

What happens after the world, as we know it, has ended? In the course of examining classic and newer speculative fictional narratives detailing the ravages of various post-apocalyptic societies and the challenges those societies pose to the survivors, we explore several related questions: What is an apocalypse? What resources does speculative fiction offer for understanding and responding to oppressive societies? Where does the idea of the apocalypse originate? Is an apocalypse always in the future? Or has it already occurred? For whom might apocalypse constitute an ongoing present? In this course, we use the tools of close reading and historical criticism to build an archive of knowledge about the narrative, visual, and aural features of apocalypse. Students will be guided through the creation of a multimedia portfolio over the course of the quarter, for presentation at the end. No written midterm or final exam.

Focus is on the Renaissance not as a cultural rebirth but as a scene of cultural conflict. Course materials are selected from Renaissance art, history, philosophy, politics, religion, and travel writing; authors include More, Luther, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Shakespeare. Among the conflicts we will explore are: old (world)/new (world), wealth/poverty, individual/collectivity, manuscript/print, religion/secularism, Catholicism/Protestantism, monarchism/republicanism, femininity/masculinity, heterosexuality/homosexuality.

This course asks about the "meaning of life" in our time, the 21st century, and over the past 200 years. It proposes that some classic reasons for living, and modes of giving value to life, ethics, religion, family are no longer particularly active; while new, poorly articulated and ill-acknowledged systems of life-evaluation rule our senses of meaning. In particular, the course will discover, try to systematize, and then test a few of these covert modern life philosophies: aestheticism; perfectionism; ecstasy. Representatives of more classic systems of meaning Christian experience, and Aristotelian ethics will offer comparative cases. Students will be challenged to articulate and evaluate their own reasons for living and anticipated meanings of life, and to become skillful interpreters of both art and ideas in texts, learning methods from literature, philosophy, and history. They should also develop richer and more precise understandings of those contested terms, modern and modernity. Readings may include Wordsworth, Thoreau, Flaubert, Aristotle, Thomas à Kempis, Theresa of Avila, Whitman, Dickinson, Sontag, plus contemporary sources.

What, if anything, does reading literature do for our lives? What can literature offer that other forms of writing cannot? Can fictions teach us anything? Can they make people more moral? Why do we take pleasure in tragic stories? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It addresses key questions about the value of literature, philosophical puzzles about the nature of fiction and literary language, and ways that philosophy and literature interact. Readings span literature, film, and philosophical theories of art. Authors may include Sophocles, Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Proust, Woolf, Walton, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Students master close reading techniques and philosophical analysis, and write papers combining the two. This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.

The course will begin with a short history of photography since the 19th century; followed by both a hands-on exploration of different types of photographs (possibly using the Cantor Collection) and then a more theoretical discussion of some of the acknowledged classics of photographic writing (Susan Sontag's On Photography, Roland Barthes' Camera lucida, Linfield's The Cruel Radiance.

The elements of fiction writing: narration, description, and dialogue. Students write complete stories and participate in story workshops. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter).nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Like other 90 and 91-level courses, 90M will explore basic elements of fiction and nonfiction writing. Students will read a wide variety of stories and essays in order to develop a language for working through the themes, forms, and concerns of the queer prose canon. Students will complete and workshop a piece of writing that in some way draws upon the aesthetics or sensibilities of the work we have read, culled from exercises completed throughout the quarter. This final piece may be a short story, a personal essay, a chapter from a novel or memoir, or a piece that, in the spirit of queerness, blurs or interrogates standard demarcations of genre. The course is open to any and all students, regardless of how they define their gender or sexuality.

Study and practice of the unique narratives, tropes, images and arguments that creative writers develop when they write about popular sport. From regional fandom to individualist adventuring, boxing and baseball to mascot dancing and table tennis, exceptional creative writers mine from a diversity of leisure activity a rich vein of ¿sports writing¿ in the creative nonfiction genre. In doing so, they demonstrate the creative and formal adaptability required to write with excellence about any subject matter, and under the circumstances of any subjectivity. Discussion of the ways in which writers have framed, and even critiqued, our interest in athletic events, spectatorship, and athletic beauty. Writers include Joyce Carol Oates, Roland Barthes, David James Duncan, Arnold Rampersad, John Updike, Maxine Kumin, Susan Sterling, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Dervla Murphy, Haruki Murakami, Don DeLillo, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and Laura Hillenbrand. Close readings of essays on form and sport, as well as book excerpts. Students will engage in class discussions and write short weekly papers, leading to a more comprehensive project at the end of the quarter.

Online workshop course that explores the ways in which writers of fiction have used language to examine the world, to create compelling characters, and to move readers. We will begin by studying a selection of stories that demonstrate the many techniques writers use to create fictional worlds; we'll use these stories as models for writing exercises and short assignments, leading to a full story draft. We will study figurative language, character and setting development, and dramatic structure, among other elements of story craft. Then, each student will submit a full draft and receive feedback from the instructor and his/her classmates. This course is taught entirely online, but retains the feel of a traditional classroom. Optional synchronous elements such as discussion and virtual office hours provide the student direct interaction with both the instructor and his/her classmates. Feedback on written work ¿ both offered to and given by the student ¿ is essential to the course and creates class rapport.

This introductory, five-unit course is designed for all students interested in reading the literature of and studying the expression of military conflict. Bridging the experiences of Veteran and non-Veteran students will be a central aim of the course and will be reflected in enrollment, reading materials, visiting guests and final narrative project.

Historical and contemporary as a broad genre including travel and nature writing, memoir, biography, journalism, and the personal essay. Students use creative means to express factual content. May be repeated for credit. First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

This is a dual purpose class: a writing workshop in which you will generate autobiographical vignettes/essays as well as a reading seminar featuring prose from a wide range of contemporary Asian-American writers. Some of the many questions we will consider are: What exactly is Asian-American memoir? Are there salient subjects and tropes that define the literature? And in what ways do our writerly interactions both resistant and assimilative with a predominantly non-Asian context in turn recreate that context? We'll be working/experimenting with various modes of telling, including personal essay, the epistolary form, verse, and even fictional scenarios. First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Open to DCI Fellows and Partners only. In this course, we will practice the art and craft of writing memoir: works of prose inspired by the memory of personal events and history. In our practice, we will look at different strategies for writing with meaning and insight about the events in our lives. We will read a variety of models by published authors who have made sense of the personal alongside the profound: the sad, joyful, simple and complicated stuff of living and being alive. Our learning will be discussion-driven. You should expect to do daily writing in the class, and to write and read widely between our class meetings. We will read, discuss, and imitate excerpts of memoirs by such authors as Augustine, Andrew Solomon, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O¿Brien, Joan Didion, and Eavan Boland, among many others. At least half of our class time will be devoted to the discussion of participants' work. The course will address issues ranging from how we select and write about events from our personal lives, to the ethical obligations of memoirists, to the ways we can explore new understanding about the past, as well as our own courage and reluctance to share personal writing. Writers at all levels of experience and comfort with creative writing are very welcome.

In this course we will be reading some of the most beautiful, magical, vital, dangerous andrevolutionary essays and stories and poems ever written, and, in our own writing about nature, will be joining that lineage that includes writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and many others. Expect to spend lots of time immersed in nature, literally and literarily. Required materials include: pen, notebook, magnifying glass, binoculars, and a good pair of shoes.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Online workshop course. Historical and contemporary as a broad genre including travel and nature writing, memoir, biography, journalism, and the personal essay. Students use creative means to express factual content.

Amazing things can happen when a writer decides to push back from their desk and go out into the world in search of stories to tell. The lives of the subjects, as well as the life of the writer, can be changed forever. In this class, we will read and discuss three classic works of documentary journalism, and students will come up with a documentary project of their own. In the process, we will practice skills such as interviewing subjects, notetaking, photography, story structure, and other techniques of documentary journalism.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Prerequisite: PWR 1. Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. May be repeated for credit.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

In this introductory course, students will write and read widely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. The course will focus primarily on the rich and varied tradition of Arab and Arab-American poets, with a special emphasis on contemporary poets exploring the intersections of cultural identity, nationhood, race, gender, and sexuality. The first half of the course will consist of close reading a selection of poems, while the second half of the course will consist of workshopping student writing. Through peer critique, students respond closely to the work of fellow writers in a supportive workshop. Writers at all levels of experience and comfort with poetry are welcome.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

From Whitman to Kerouac, Alec Soth to Georgia O'Keeffe, the lure of travel has inspired many American artists to pack up their bags and hit the open road. In this course we will be exploring the art and literature of the great American road trip. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own personal projects, and considering a wide breadth of narrative approaches. Assignments will range from reading Cormac McCarthy's novel, 'The Road,' to listening to Bob Dylan's album, 'Highway 61 Revisited.' We will be looking at films like 'Badlands' and 'Thelma and Louise,' acquainting ourselves with contemporary photographers, going on a number of campus-wide field trips, and finishing the quarter with an actual road trip down the California coast. Anyone with a sense of adventure is welcome!

For minors in creative writing. The forms and conventions of the contemporary short story and poem. How form, technique, and content combine to make stories and poems organic. Prerequisite: 90, 91, or 92.

Gender is one of the great social issues of our time. What does it mean to be female or feminine? How has femininity been defined, performed, punished, or celebrated? Writers are some of our most serious and eloquent investigators of these questions, and in this class we'll read many of our greatest writers on the subject of femininity, as embodied by both men and women, children and adults, protagonists and antagonists. From Virginia Woolf to Ernest Hemingway, from Beloved to Gone Girl (and even "RuPaul's Drag Race"), we'll ask how the feminine is rendered and contested. We'll do so in order to develop a history and a vocabulary of femininity so that we may, in this important time, write our own way in to the conversation. This is first and foremost a creative writing class, and our goals will be to consider in our own work the importance of the feminine across the entire spectrum of gender, sex, and identity. We will also study how we write about femininity, using other writers as models and inspiration. As we engage with these other writers, we will think broadly and bravely, and explore the expressive opportunities inherent in writing. We will explore our own creative practices through readings, prompted exercises, improv, games, collaboration, workshop, and revision, all with an eye toward writing the feminine future.

How much can we really know about something written a thousand or more years ago? In this class, we will work towards answering this question as we read the most famous piece of Old English literature. Our ultimate goal will be learning to read as medievalists, investigating what Beowulf's story, its characters, and its heroic ethos may have meant to its medieval audience's and what it means to us today. Whether you plan to research medieval topics in your undergraduate (or graduate) career, want to explore the medieval basis of modern fantasy and historical fiction, or just love a good epic tale, join us and learn to think, interpret, and research like a medievalist. This class can be taken as an Old English language course and/or an introduction to Old English literature in translation. All levels of experience are welcome!

What does it mean to be an animal? And what does it mean to be a person? Ideas about other species - how they think and feel, act and react - involve categories such as race, gender, class and ability in often-surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animal life and human identity in twentieth-century American fiction, from the advent of Darwinian thought to contemporary animal advocacy. Readings will include Jack London, Zora Neale Hurston, Linda Hogan, Ruth Ozeki, Philip K. Dick and Grant Morrison, as well selected texts from the growing field of critical animal theory. The course also offers an optional community engagement opportunity to work with Animal Assisted Happiness or another multi-species organization.

Students will learn the language skills necessary to parse and translate the earliest literature written in the English language. The course will look at how Anglo-Saxon authors used the particularly rich qualities of their vernacular to craft texts that represent and reflect on war, a principal institution of their medieval society. Our discussion will consider how the conventions of genre and form, as well as contextual forces like religion, cultural tradition, and contemporary history, shaped their writing on the subject.

W.B. Yeats once sought inspiration in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart," a place where litter and scraps were recycled into the paper that held his poems. In this course, we will reconsider the literary text as a physical object, tracing how writers integrate its physical characteristics into their poetry and prose during eras of increasing mechanization. How do these texts ask us to ¿read¿ the printed page? When and why do we ignore it? How does literature engage our senses and call attention to itself? This course will include meetings in Stanford Special collections to examine original editions of our texts. Readings include works by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, William Blake, William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and Gertrude Stein.

From self-driving cars to bots that alter democratic elections, artificial intelligence is growing increasingly powerful and prevalent in our everyday lives. Literature has long been speculating about the techno-utopia¿and catastrophe¿that A.I. could usher in. Indeed, literature itself presents us with a kind of A.I. in the many characters that speak and think in its pages. But how do we classify an intelligence as ¿artificial¿ or not? Is there a clear boundary that demarcates bodies from machines? What, if anything, separates the ¿genre¿ of technology from that of literature? What classifies literature as ¿science fiction,¿ ¿scientific,¿ ¿futuristic,¿ ¿psychological,¿ or ¿dystopian¿? And can technology or literature ever overcome the ultimate division between all intelligences¿the problem of other minds? This course consists in curated multi-genre combinations of literature, philosophy, film, and television that explore what makes someone¿or something¿a person in our world today. Special events will include celebrating the current bicentennial of Mary Shelley¿s Frankenstein (1818) in Stanford Special Collections; a possible visit to Stanford¿s A.I. Laboratory; and chatting with the ELIZA chatbot.

This course explores literary and filmic narratives about disability in the Global South. Authors including Edwidge Danticat, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Ricardo Padilla highlight the unique aesthetic potential of what Michael Davidson calls the defamiliar body and Ato Quayson describes as aesthetic nervousness. While engaging universal issues of disability stigma, they also emphasize the specific geopolitics of disability how people in the Global South face greater rates of impairment based on unequal exposure to embodied risk. The course particularly welcomes students with interests in fields of medicine, policy, or public health.

When we imagine the exemplary global or postcolonial novel, we're likely to think of novels from India. But the current dominance of Indian Anglophone fiction was hardly the tryst with destiny it seems in retrospect. This course offers a perspective on the emergence of the Anglophone novel in India through a conversation with its linguistic and generic others works in the competing modes of short stories, poetry, and film. The course may include writings by Mulk Raj Anand, G.V. Desani, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy, as well as selections from the volume A History of the Indian Novel in English.

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? The second quarter focuses on the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, Europe's re-acquaintance with classical antiquity and its first contacts with the New World. Authors include Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Milton.

William Carlos Williams wrote that ¿a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. This class will consider lyric poems as machines for thinking, taking up the question of poetry's relationship to abstract, propositional thought. We will ask what kinds of thoughts poems as opposed to other genres of written discourse allow us to think, and explore how poems embody thought through careful attention to the mechanics of lyric form. The class will be organized into five units devoted to themes that our poems will address: love, nature, things, society, and death. While discussion of these themes will range broadly with the aim of maximizing their relevance to each participant in the class, our analysis will be tied closely to the individual poems in front of us. We will read a diverse set of poets writing in English stretching from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, including poems by Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Phillis Wheatley, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claudia Rankine, and Jorie Graham, among others. This class should be of interest to all students and writers of poetry, as well as of special interest to those in the ¿literature and philosophy¿ track within the major.

Classical Italy attracted thousands of travelers throughout the 1700s. Referring to their journey as the "Grand Tour," travelers pursued intellectual passions, promoted careers, and satisfied wanderlust, all while collecting antiquities to fill museums and estates back home. What can digital approaches tell us about who traveled, where and why? We will read travel accounts; experiment with parsing; and visualize historical data. Final projects to form credited contributions to the Grand Tour Project, a cutting-edge digital platform. No prior experience necessary.

Focus is on Shakespeare's Hamlet as a site of rich critical controversy from the eighteenth century to the present. Aim is to read, discuss, and evaluate different approaches to the play, from biographical, theatrical, and psychological to formalist, materialist, feminist, new historicist, and, most recently, quantitative. The ambition is to see whether there can be great literature without (a) great (deal of) criticism. The challenge is to understand the theory of literature through the study of its criticism.

This course will consider a range of Shakespeare plays (and the language of the plays) in relation to different contemporary and post-contemporary contexts, including transvestite theater, gender, sexuality, history, geopolitics, travel, and performance.

Anglophone fiction confronts readers with a paradox: It uses English to describe situations where little English is spoken, and where other languages make their presence known in the form of borrowed words, translated phrases, and unfamiliar syntax. Combining global superstars like Salman Rushdie with lesser-known authors like Phaswane Mpe and Mayra Santos-Febres, the class looks at the globalization of English in three very different contexts: India, South Africa, and the Dominican Republic.

Description: "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest," writes Joan Didion, "remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." From the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, Yosemite to the Salton Sea, encounter a series of writers and artists whose work is set in California, or participates in its imagining, and throughout consider how culture and a sense of place are closely related. How does a novel, photograph, or film conjure community or landscape? When we think of California, whose stories are included, and whose are left out? Possible texts: works by Mary Austin, Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, John Steinbeck, and Nathanael West; the films Sunset Boulevard,Clueless,and There Will Be Blood; and the art of Carlton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, Richard Misrach, Martín Ramírez, Wayne Thiebaud, and Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Visit New Almaden, a quicksilver mine in the 19thcentury, later Superfund Site, now a museum and popular trail.For the final paper, students research a place in California of their choice, or a Mission mural walk, or the Oakland Museum of California.

Description: America has an obsession with superheroes and a problem with police--the last decade has been dominated by both blockbuster superhero films and negotiations over police power. This course will take an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and critical look at models of police power as they appear in superhero/supercop texts, including film, thinkpieces, novels for young readers, and comics, as well as a look at the historic foundations of American policing and contemporary police theory. What do superheroes teach us about police? And what do police teach us about superheroes? How can we read cultural production around this topic in a useful way? What constitutes propaganda, and what constitutes useful debate?

Medieval Studies is entering a phase of digital abundance. In the last seven years, more medieval material has been put online than has ever been available for study at any point in the past. How can we engage with the growing mass of digitized material available to us? How does this sudden access impact the work we do, the types of questions we ask, the connections we make, and the audiences we write for?nnIn this course, we will examine and evaluate digital medieval resources and software that has been created for interacting with those resources. Students will have the opportunity to design and create an innovative project based on medieval primary sources held at Stanford, applying current digital methods in the analysis and presentation of those resources.

Description: Trolls, ogres, elves, dwarves, dragons, draugar, wizards, witches, and fairies¿these creatures and characters, so familiar to modern readers, moviegoers, and gamers, have an ancient pedigree stretching back into the darkness of prehistoric Europe, and have enthralled human imagination for just as long. This course visits their first emergence into written literary record during the medieval period, from the earliest Dark Age mythological folklore of Britain and Scandinavia to the courtly and whimsical romance of the high and late middle ages. What significance and meaning did medieval writers from different times and places see in magic and monsters; what superstitions and beliefs converged in their efforts to represent things ¿from the other side,¿ and what compelled them to do so? We will address such questions by reading the literature against the social, cultural, and religious contexts that shaped medieval life and artistic production; our goal is to discover how these authors used the fantastic to moralize and theologize, to confront and explain alterity, and to thrill their readers. Finally we will turn to the modern era with J. R. R. Tolkien¿s The Fellowship of the Ring and Kazuo Ishiguro¿s The Buried Giant, reflecting on how professional and popular literary medievalism has cultivated the tropes of medieval fantasy to produce works which mediate between an imagined history, sublime fabrication, and contemporary concerns.

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.

How does a groundbreaking first wave feminist theorist and novelistic innovator speak intergenerationally? Everything about #MeToo can be found in Virginia Woolf's works, from gender oppression, to the politics of women's entry into the public sphere, to the struggle of women to be heard and believed. We begin with A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), tying them to media coverage of #MeToo, then turn to the identity politics of her fiction and to broader histories of feminism and feminist theory.

A set of major works of art produced at the peak of the novel's centrality as a cultural form: Austen's Emma, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Eliot's Middlemarch, Dickens's Great Expectations, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The paradoxes of work, consciousness and the organization of narrative experience, habit and attention. Urban experience, shifting forms of individualism, ways of knowing other persons. Binary and concentric structures, happiness and moral action, arrays of characters.

We have to grow up. We have no choice in the matter. But what does this lack of choice mean for the way experience growing up¿either as a tragedy or perhaps not? This course will explore various writers¿ approaches to one of the defining genres of the novel, the bildungsroman, the story of finding one¿s place in the world. We all negotiate between our youthful dreams and the compromises of experience. How do we forge our storylines? By choosing a vocation? A romantic partner? By moving from the country to the city, or from one country to another? Reading stories from Victorian and modernist Britain as well as contemporary America, we will question the variety of ways in which the bildungsroman explores questions of identity formation, social changes, and experiments in literary form. Readings include works by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Jeffrey Eugenides, Junot Díaz, and Hayao Miyazaki.

How do novels represent sexual life? This course reads texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, and considers how novelists represent the discombobulating effects of desire in fictional prose. Authors may include: S. Richardson, N. Hawthorne, J. Austen, E. Brontë, G. Gissing, H. James, D.H. Lawrence, J. Joyce, V. Nabokov, J. Baldwin, A. Hollinghurst and Z. Smith.

For more than a century, cars and movies have occupied a romantic place in the American imagination, as vehicles that can take us someplace new and engines for our fantasies of mobility, freedom and personal expression. Perhaps this is one reason why the road movie is one of the most enduring subgenres of twentieth-century film. In this class, we'll watch and discuss ten celebrated American travel films, one for each decade starting from Buster Keaton's silent Go West (1925) and arriving at Alexander Payne's wry anti-road film Nebraska (2013). In between we'll travel by car, bus, motorcycle and even on foot across America and beyond, searching for answers to the motivating questions for this course: what is the attraction of the open road, and how is the romance of its call embraced and challenged by the multiple genres of these films, the concerns of the decades in which they were produced, and the limits they impose on the idea of unrestricted travel, individual growth and independence. A secondary goal of this class is to familiarize students with the language and concepts of film art and criticism. To that end, we'll pair our films with readings from Bordwell, Thompson and Smith's influential textbook Film Art: an Introduction. Students will therefore not only be immersed in the themes specific to this course, but will also learn how to analyze and speak about film as a medium.

From self-driving cars to bots that alter democratic elections, artificial intelligence is growing increasingly powerful and prevalent in our everyday lives. Fiction has long been speculating about the techno-utopia¿and catastrophe¿that A.I. could usher in. Indeed, fiction itself presents us with a kind of A.I. in the many characters that speak and think in its pages. So what constitutes an ¿intelligence¿ within literature or technology? In either field, is it ever possible to overcome the problem of other minds? Is there an ultimate boundary that demarcates bodies from machines? This course will begin with Mary Shelley¿s Frankenstein (1818) and Edgar Allan Poe¿s ¿Maelzel¿s Chess Player¿ (1836), then proceed through works such as Samuel Butler¿s Erewhon (1872), Isaac Asimov¿s I, Robot (1950), Stanley Kubrick¿s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Stanford lecturer Scott Hutchins¿s A Working Theory of Love (2012), including a possible visit from Hutchins. Throughout, we will be asking ourselves what makes someone¿or something¿a person in our world today.

Detective fiction is one of the most popular genres in the world. It is also, interestingly, one of the most international genres as well. In this course, we¿ll look at a selection of globally oriented detective stories, from the Sherlock Holmes to The Tunnel, and explore the ways in which detective fiction participates in the global imagination. How do these detective stories represent the tension between community and cultural difference? How do conceptions of cultural or racial ¿otherness¿ influence views of suspicion, guilt or innocence? How far does detective fiction fulfill a cosmopolitan ideal of transnational justice, and in what ways does it fall short? As we analyze the conventions of the detective genre and consider how it examines issues faced by our increasingly globalized community¿including immigration, imperialism, identity politics, and terrorism¿we¿ll ask larger questions about the nature of community, morality, law, and justice across national and cultural boundaries.

How did American and British women writers express their experiences of modernity? A major critical lens on modernism interrogates questions of gender and sexuality, including how women expressed the experiences of `writing as a woman during these years (1910-1940). But distinctions of race, class, culture, nation, and literary inheritance were powerful determinants on how individual writers gave voice to their creative aspirations. This course explores what binds and what differentiates various forms of aesthetic, political, and cultural representation in the works of pioneering transatlantic innovators: Virginia Woolf; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Zora Neale Hurston; Djuna Barnes; Katherine Mansfield; Nella Larson; Amy Lowell; H.D.; Jessie Fauset; Nancy Cunard.

Thomas Malory's Arthurian epic Le Morte D'Arthur (The Death of Arthur) is often thought of as the last medieval English text. As a prose narrative describing the gradual annihilation of King Arthur's legendary court at Camelot and the disintegration of the medieval courtly values that once held it together, the book seems to be a fitting swan song for what we think of as the English middle ages. In this course students will read Malory's Middle English legend of King Arthur in its historical and material context, developing an appreciation for its literary style and cultivating an awareness of the medieval traditions and technologies that shaped the author's work. We will then read T. H. White's The Once and Future King, a 20th century Arthurian novel based on Le Morte D'Arthur, and students will compare White's interpretation and adaptation to their own encounter with Malory's text. This course examines how authors and readers confront and imagine the medieval, and how the quest to capture the elusive idea of the dark ages illuminates the preoccupations of the present.

The centrality of the marriage plot in the development of the British novel beginning in the 18th century with Samuel Richardson's Pamela and ending with Woolf's modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between novelistic plotting and the development of female characters into marriageable women. What is the relationship between the novel and feminine subjectivity? What aspects of marriage make it work as a plotting device? What kinds of marriages do marriage plots allow? Is the development of women's political agency related to their prominence in the novel form?

How does the past come to life, on the page and on the screen? From Walter Scott, to Toni Morrison, to the popular romances, films, and television series of today, this course considers a range of texts that draw their settings, characters, and plots from history. We will examine how each work addresses some of the central tensions of historical fiction: between the imagined past and the past as reconstructed through research, between description and the spirit of the past, between accuracy and relevance. Our focus will be on the craft of historical fiction and the power of techniques like description, dialogue, setting, and character to reanimate the past. For the final assessment, students will choose between a traditional argumentative paper and a historical story of their own invention.

The Wild West: a mythical place seared deep into the American imagination. Its familiar tropes lone riders on horseback, desert sunsets, saloon fights, train robberies echo through countless Western stories, novels, films, radio programs, and television series. Both formulaic and flexible, the Western has endured as a popular genre in American culture for more than a century, embodying and responding to many of the nation's broader anxieties surrounding its colonial history, its notions of masculinity and gender roles, its fascination with guns and violence, and its ideals of self-reliance and individualism. In this class we'll examine the Western genre through a selection of its central works in fiction and film, from the first dime novel Western, Ann S. Stephens Malaeska (1860), to Cormac McCarthy¿s acclaimed Blood Meridian (1985); and from the first silent film Western, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), to the mid-century Hollywood films of John Ford, to Maggie Greenwald¿s feminist Western, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). Along the way we'll examine the Western as both a literary form and a cultural phenomenon, probing the history of its enduring appeal as a genre. How do these novels and films construct, adapt, and subvert the form and expectations of the Western, and how do they both perpetuate and challenge the broader cultural problems of their, and our, time? Finally, as Californians and inheritors of the nation's westward expansion, what does the Western tell us about national myths of the West, and the place in which we live?

This course examines the literary and cultural significance of the personal essay. We will begin with some influential theories of the essay, and conclude by considering the changing media from periodicals to blogs in which it appears. In between, we will explore some of the many reasons writers have had for writing themselves into their essays, such as explaining their personal tastes, demanding action from their readers, bearing witness to trauma, and making the personal political. Course readings will be drawn from across the rich history of the personal essay, including works by Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Elif Batuman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. As we explore the literary history, structure, and style of the personal essay, we will also reflect on what this genre reveals about the modern person. How are individuals shaped by social, cultural, and political forces? How are the ways we construct and express ourselves affected by changes in the media? And what might the personal essay reveal about the shifting boundaries between self and other, public and private, fact and fiction? Throughout the course, students will complete a series of short critical assignments, culminating in a final paper in which they will apply what they have learned to produce personal essays of their own.

An introduction to the illuminated world of William Blake¿poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist. The course will address Blake's visual iconography, belief system and ideology, unique mythology, and method of relief etching that allowed him to make every illuminated book a unique work of art, among them, The Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Book of Thel; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Urizen; America a Prophecy; and Europe a Prophecy.

In American politics where `alternative facts has entered the lexicon in a `post-truth attempt at media control, and in Britain where Brexit has reactivated a `little England model of insular nationalism, the concerns of British writers in the 1930s that `low dishonest decade as the poet W.H. Auden famously described it on nationalism, militarism, and the politics of language seem especially prescient now. Alert to nativism in a post-Depression era, and the losses of progressive ideals (unevenly) cultured during the 1920s, these writers explored the relationship and stakes between words and politics as they faced an increasingly fascistic continent. Writers include: George Orwell, Storm Jameson, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Naomi Michinson, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and C.L.R. James.

This course traces the ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

What is the continuing relevance of modernist literature? At the beginning of the 20th century, modernism announced itself as a radically new departure from the past; we're still grappling with it today. This class examines older classics (authors may include Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Henry James, or Virginia Woolf), along with more recent works that seem to allude to or otherwise make use of modernism (authors may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, and more).

In contemporary American politics where the phrase ¿alternative facts¿ has entered our lexicon in a post-truth attempt at media control, and where the activation of Brexit returns to Britain a little England model of insular nationalism, it might be a good time to return to the concerns of British writers in the 1930s about nationalism, militarism, and the politics of language. Well aware of nativist risks in a post-Depression era, as well as the loss of progressive ideals (unevenly) cultured during the 1920s, these writers explored the relationship and stakes between words and politics as they faced an increasingly fascistic continent. Writers include: G. Orwell, S. Jameson, W. Holtby, V. Brittain, N. Michinson, E. Waugh, S. Gibson, L. Woolf, V.Woolf, A. Huxley, W.H. Auden, C.Isherwood

This course will study the adaptation from short stories to films, with a particular eye toward the form and structure of each media and their relationship to each other. Students will read a variety of 20th and 21st century stories and watch their adaptations (including ¿Rashomon" and ¿Brokeback Mountain,¿), as well as write a short screenplay adaptation and a short critical essay on a story/film of their choosing.

(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.) Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, "Black Elk Speaks."

What made modernism `new? Is the movement `evergreen? We examine representational change, narrative innovation, and political aesthetics in the poetry, short fiction, and novels of four iconic pioneers: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot.

From its inception, Jewish-American literature has taken as its subject as well as its context the idea of Jewishness itself. Jewish culture is a diasporic one, and for this reason the concept of Jewishness differs from country to country and across time. What stays remarkably similar, though, is Jewish self-perception and relatedly Jewish literary style. This is as true for the first-generation immigrant writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska who came to the United States from abroad as it is for their second-generation children born in the United States, and the children of those children. In this course, we will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation and their efforts to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment. We'll also examine the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their (grand-)parents nostalgia and failure to assimilate. Only by considering these transnational roots can one understand the particularity of the Jewish-American novel in relation to mainstream and minority American literatures. In investigating the link between American Jewish writers and their literary progenitors, we will draw largely but not exclusively from Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.

Introduction to the work of an American writer, beloved by general readers, often reviled by critics, whose career spanned from the Great Depression through World War II to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Focus on the social and political contexts of Steinbeck's major works; his fascination with California and Mexico; his interdisciplinary interest in marine biology and in philosophy; his diverse experiments with literary form, including drama and film.

An exploration of the Short Story's evolution and variety of voices from its emergence in the 19th century to the present day. Weekly themes include the Detective Story, Immigration, Failure, Science Fiction, and Adolescence. We'll read a range of mostly American writers Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Sola Kim with an eye to uncovering the historical, cultural, and stylistic secrets of the Short Story, from both a literary criticism and a creative writing viewpoint.

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, baseball has been steeped in lore and rhetoric. A cultural commentator recently pegged it one of three significant American contributions to world culture, along with jazz and the U.S. constitution. Literary and artistic representations of baseball abound, often treating it as more than a game and only a little less than a religion. In this class, we¹ll track representations and grand claims made for baseball by American poets, novelists, and commentators of all sorts. We'll weigh the cornucopia of literary nonfiction depicting the game. The goal will be to map the scope of this literature, defining a tradition's edges, determining its peaks, assessing its limits, challenges, and stakes. This class is open to anyone, whether familiar with the game, or totally new to it. We'll cover a variety of issues: Americana, mythologies of sport, gender and class, race, history, sociology, lots of poetry, and film.

Focus on great dramas about family life (Albee, Kushner, Shephard, Vogel, Kron, Nottage, Parks). Communication in writing and speaking about conflict central to learning in this class.

The development of women's poetry from the 17th to the 20th century. How these poets challenge and enhance the canon, amending and expanding ideas of tone, voice and craft, while revising societal expectations of the poet's identity. Poets include Katharine Philips, Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.

Some poets are known for portraying alternative sexualities in their poetry. Others seem to cover sexuality up. Can we use a poem to determine whether a poet is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning? Or do some poets simply defy categorization? What makes a poem queer? Is poetry somehow more or less queer than other literary forms? Even if we can answer these questions, what would they tell us about literature in general? This course will investigate such topics and more by tracking queer poetry in twentieth-century America. We'll start with nineteenth-century figures Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, then move on to Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and others. We'll ask what their poetry meant in their own times, as well as what it means to us in our present era of expanding civil rights and changing sexual attitudes.

Reading of central writers of the Beat movement (Ginsberg, Kerouac, di Prima, Snyder, Whalen) as well as some related writers (Creeley, Gunn, Levertov). Issues explored include NY and SF, Buddhism and leftist politics, poetry and jazz. Some exposure to reading poems to jazz accompaniment. Examination of some of the writers and performers growing out of the Beats: Bob Dylan, rock music, especially from San Francisco, and jazz.

Examination of the explosion of African American artistic expression during 1920s and 30s New York known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amiri Baraka once referred to the Renaissance as a kind of "vicious Modernism", as a "BangClash", that impacted and was impacted by political, cultural and aesthetic changes not only in the U.S. but Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Focus on the literature, graphic arts, and the music of the era in this global context.

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st-century U.S. Issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation, and racial prejudice in American society. Topics include the political and social formation of race; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of census categories and the rise of the multiracial movement.

What are the digital humanities? A definition might be: Digital humanities are those pursuits which use digital tools to explore topics of humanistic inquiry. But that definition is rather general. To have a more nuanced understanding of the digital humanities, students will be exposed to a number of its practices, and practitioners. Active engagement by all participants is expected. Students will read and annotate, map and perform digital textual analysis. Ultimately, students will have a better idea of what the digital humanities are, and will be introduced to different ways they can be practiced, opening up possibilities for further exploration.

How did American and British women writers in the early decades of the last century express their experiences of modernity in fiction and poetry? A major but oscillating critical lens on modernism has focused on questions of gender and sexuality, and how women expressed the experiences of writing as a woman during these years (1910-1940). But other differences and distinctions of race, class, culture, nation, and literary inheritance were also crucial to the endeavor to give voice to a new sense of identity for many of these women. This course aims to uncover what binds as well as what differentiates forms of political, aesthetic, and cultural representation in the works of several key innovators in this period: V. Woolf; Z. Neale Hurston; D. Barnes; K. Mansfield; N. Larson; A. Lowell; H.D.; J. Faust; N. Cunard.

In this course, we will apply spatial humanities techniques to the study of Romantic writing. In the lyric poetry, national tales and Gothic novels of the Romantic period, how did geography, both real and imagined, influence the kinds of writing that were possible? Were there kinds of writing that could only happen in certain kinds of places? Together, using a combination of GIS mapping and geo-location, we will create a digital, annotated map of the Romantic imaginative world.

Plays, poems, short stories, and novels. Writers include James Joyce, William Yeats, Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien,William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Samuel Beckett. How the writer can sustain imaginative freedom and literary experiment in the face of a turbulent history.

Issues of authenticity, morality, personal identity, and the value of truth explored through film; philosophical investigation of the filmic medium itself. Screenings to include Blade Runner (Scott), Do The Right Thing (Lee), The Seventh Seal (Bergman), Fight Club (Fincher), La Jetée (Marker), Memento (Nolan), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kaufman). Taught in English.

What role does creativity play in the life of a scientist? How has science inspired great literature? How do you write accessibly and expressively about things like whales, DNA or cancer? This course begins with a field trip to Hopkins Marine Station, perched at the edge of the Pacific, where Stanford labs buzz with activity alongside barking seals and crashing waves. Here, in this spectacular setting, we learn to pay attention to our encounters with the natural world and translate sensory experience to the page. Students keep field journals to collect observations and cultivate a reflective practice. In-class writing experiments lead to original nonfiction combining personal narrative and scientific curiosity. Students workshop their projects, receiving supportive feedback from the group. You will develop a more patient and observant eye, improve your ability to articulate scientific concepts, and, hopefully, have a bit of fun along the way.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

(Graduate students register for 258H.) This course will consider the remarkable nexus of scientific research and literature that developed on the Monterey Peninsula in the first half of the 20th century and how the two areas of creativity influenced each other. The period of focus begins with the 1932 association of John and Carol Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and Joseph Campbell, all of whom were highly influenced by the Carmel poet, Robinson Jeffers ¿ and ends with the novels Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954). An indisputable high-tide mark, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely of Travel and Research (1941) will be considered in detail. Weekend field trips will include intertidal exploration, a tour of the Jeffers Tor House in Carmel, and whale watching on Monterey Bay.

Black, gay and gifted, Baldwin was hailed as a "spokesman for the race", although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. This course examines his classic novels and essays as well his exciting work across many lesser-examined domains - poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy and artistic collaboration. Placing his work in context with other writers of the 20C (Faulkner, Wright,Morrison) and capitalizing on a resurgence of interest in the writer (NYC just dedicated a year of celebration of Baldwin and there are 2 new journals dedicated to study of Baldwin), the course seeks to capture the power and influence of Baldwin's work during the Civil Rights era as well as his relevance in the "post-race" transnational 21st century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership and country assume new urgency.

How does literary art get involved in politics? What is the border between propaganda and art? This class examines moments when writers seem suddenly not only to represent politically charged topics and themes, but to have a part in bringing about political change. We¿ll look at case studies from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the American Civil Rights struggle, 19th century Russia, and more.

Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse.

An introduction to stories and storytelling--that is, to narrative. What is narrative? When is narrative fictional and when non-fictional? How is it done, word by word, sentence by sentence? Must it be in prose? Can it be in pictures? How has storytelling changed over time? Focus on various forms, genres, structures, and characteristics of narrative.

In these highly regarded, small-group seminars, students explore unique topics in English language literature, reading select primary texts alongside exemplary critical works and/or other cultural artifacts, while also honing their research and writing skills through series of assignments that culminate in a substantial original research essay. Classes are capped at 8, allowing for individualized attention and rich feedback. Click Schedule below to see individual course titles (in Notes). For fuller details and descriptions, go to https://english.stanford.edu/writing-intensive-seminars-english-wise. Enrollment is by permission. 2018-2019 course topics include: neo-slave narratives; nineteenth-century novels; Renaissance drama; American conspiracy theories; James Joyce and modernism; Shakespeare adaptations; colonies of the gothic; and the Beats. English majors must take at least one WISE to fulfill WIM. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting.

Was the eighteenth century right in proclaiming Shakespeare to be the greatest moral philosopher? What are the ethical challenges Shakespeare's major plays still pose for us? Can we divorce ethical decisions from the contingencies of experience? We will ask a series of normative ethical questions (to do with pleasure, power, old age, self-sacrifice, and truth telling) and attempt to answer them in relation to the dramatic situation of Shakespeare's characters on the one hand and our own cultural situation on the other. The ethical challenge of Shakespearean drama will be set against selected readings in ethical theory.

In this Introduction to Shakespeare on film, we will study approximately five Shakespearean plays, including Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Macbeth, alongside a selection of their movie adaptations. As well as getting to grips with the plays printed texts, we will investigate how the plays meanings and significations can change radically in performance.

Required for American Studies majors. In this seminar we trace diverse and changing interpretations of American identity by exploring autobiographical, literary, and/or visual texts from the 18th through the 20th century in conversation with sociological, political, and historical accounts. *Fulfills Writing In the Major Requirement for American Studies Majors*

(English majors must register for 5 units) A study of recent developments in understanding human moral psychology using mafia movies to explore the differences between Kantian and Utilitarian moral theory. We will study the greatest hits of gangster fiction and film, from Fielding's Jonathan Wild to The Sopranos.

How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows. Includes an optional Haas Center for Public Service certified Community Engaged Learning section.

In a post-Darwin world, the notion that we might all have an animal alter-ego lurking inside seems quite familiar. But ideas about animals¿how they think and feel, act and react¿involve identity categories such as race, gender, class and ability in surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animality and human life in twentieth-century American fiction, from race and indigeneity in Jack London¿s dog stories to the storytelling practices of contemporary animal advocacy groups. The course may also include an experiential component in which students will have the opportunity to explore multispecies concerns with a local organization.

This course investigates a selection of novels from 2001 to the present, either authored in the United States or strongly and meaningfully received here by critics and gatekeepers. In the absence of a fixed academic canon or acknowledged tradition of exemplary works, this course includes evaluation as one of its central enterprises. Students help to make arguments for which works matter and why. Students consider topics including the demotion of the novel to a minor art form, competition from the image, transformations of celebrity culture (in literature and outside it), relevance or irrelevance of the digital age, aftermaths of the modernist and postmodernist project, eccentricity and marginality, race and gender politics in putatively post-feminist, post-racial,and post-political vantage, and problems of meaning in rich societies oriented to risk, probability, economization, health, consumption, comfort, and recognition or representation (rather than action or event). Novels and short stories may be supplemented by philosophical and sociological visions of the contemporary.

Reading is a political act. Through our major texts of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Zora Neale Hurston¿s The Eatonville Anthology, and Azar Nafisi¿s Reading Lolita in Tehran, we will explore the classed, racialized, and gendered power dynamics of literacy and literature. How can books incite social revolutions? How can they maintain harmful inequalities? When is reading a tool of empowerment and when is it a tool of social control? We will examine these questions in a number of contexts, ranging from Victorian London, to the Jim Crow American South, from the Islamic revolution in Iran to a Silicon Valley proliferating with new forms of scientific, technological, and financial literacy. The course includes a significant service learning component, in which students will volunteer to tutor underprivileged readers through Bay Area literacy programs. Final projects will ask students to reflect on these tutoring experiences and consider the complex politics at work in the act of teaching someone to read.

Course will examine the intersecting genres of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Topics will include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.); the role of language in the development of the self; the relational nature of the self (vis-à-vis the family, "society," God); the cultural status of "individuality"; the concept of childhood; and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of family, religious and national history. In addition to short theoretical works, authors will include Knausgaard, Nabokov, Hoffman, Winterson, Said, Levi, Barthes, and Duras.

This course will introduce students to the ways that the practices of literary text mining can help us to understand, study, and shape our understanding of identity. Each week, we will spend one class discussing critical works by theorists like Toni Morrison, and Linda Martín Alcoff and digital scholars like Roopika Risam and Ted Underwood; we will then spend the second class of the week learning and practicing digital methods in programs like Python and Gephi. Students do not need any programming knowledge to take this class.

This course will train students in applied methods for computationally analyzing texts for humanities research. The skills students will gain will include basic programming for textual analysis, applied statistical evaluation of results and the ability to present these results within a formal research paper or presentation. Students in the course will also learn the prerequisite steps of such an analysis including corpus selection and cleaning, metadata collection, and selecting and creating an appropriate visualization for the results.

Virginia Woolf once wrote, "The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry." Problems of representation are at the heart of the experiences of physical suffering and medical care; how has literature defined and redefined its relationship to these experiences? Topics include medical and literary interpretation, illness and metaphor, and the evolution of the surface-depth model of the self. The course centers on major works of literature that engage the imaginative potential of medicine and the narrative structures of disease, by authors including Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and Arthur Conan Doyle, read alongside paintings (Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp), film (Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers), medical descriptions of disease, diagnostic tools, and theory (e.g., Sontag's Illness as Metaphor).

The literary representation of crime and the criminal from postrevolutionary through contemporary American literature. Topics will include the enigma of the criminal personality; varieties of crime, from those underwritten by religious or ethical principle to those produced by the deformations of bias; the impact on narrative form of the challenge of narrating crime; and the significance attributed to gratuitous crime in the American cultural context.

How do novelists and scientists render visible the invisible? How do they think outside the accumulated meanings of their time? And how do they confront the risk of disenchantment that knowledge and explanation pose? This course centers on major literary works including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Topics include experimentation in science and in art, the use of fictions in science, how science and art train our perceptual capacities, imagination and responsibility, metaphor and metaphorical thinking, & objectivity and its alternatives.

Intermediate course in the craft and art of fiction writing. Students read a diverse range of short stories and novel excerpts, complete writing exercises, and submit a short and longer story to be workshopped and revised. Prerequisite: 90 or 91. nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Study how dialogue develops character, reveals information, moves plots forward, and creates tension. Use of short story, novels, graphic novels, and films. Students will write many short assignments, one dialogue scene, and one longer story or script (10-20pages). Prerequisite: 90.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

The main requirement for this course is a 50,000 word novel. The course explores elements of novel writing including fictional structure, character creation, scene vs. summary, as well as description, narration, and dialogue. Students will read four to five short novels during the first half of the course and then participate in National Novel Writing Month, an international writing event. Students will additionally write synopses, outlines, character sketches, and search tirelessly for the novel¿s engine: its voice. Designed for any student who has always wanted to write a novel.

Workshop. For screenwriting students. Story craft, structure, and dialogue. Assignments include short scene creation, character development, and a long story. How fictional works are adapted to screenplays, and how each form uses elements of conflict, time, summary, and scene. Prerequisite: 90.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Interdisciplinary. Evolution, subject matter, form, conventions, possibilities, and future of the graphic novel genre. Guest lectures. Collaborative creation of a graphic novel by a team of writers, illustrators, and designers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Intermediate Queer Stories is a workshop class open to any and all students, regardless of how they define their gender or sexuality. The goals of the class are to read widely in the canon of twentieth and twenty-first century queer prose literature, and to create work that draws on the styles, modes, and subjects of these writers. In the second half of the class, students will workshop a longer piece of their own writing that in some way draws upon the aesthetics or sensibilities of the writers we have read. This piece may be a short story, a personal essay, a chapter from a novel or memoir, or a piece that, in the spirit of queerness, blurs or interrogates standard demarcations of genre.

Who better to discuss a book with than its author? In this course we will immerse ourselves in eight short story collections and meet with many of the authors of these collections to hear about their experience drafting, revising, and sending their books out into the world. We will read as writers for inspiration and craft and analyze the collections for structure, character development, dialogue, setting, language, and theme. We will pay particular attention to the range, arrangement, and architecture of the story collection as a whole. How does a collection become greater than the sum of its parts? How does an author manage so many stops and starts? We will write about, discuss, and present the collections we read, participate in Q&A with visiting authors, and complete weekly in-class writing exercises designed to inform and inspire our own writing.

The main requirement for this course is a full length film script. The course explores elements of screenwriting including beat structure, character creation, scene vs. montage, as well as description and dialogue. Students will read four to five screenplays during the first half of the course and then write a 90-page film script in the second half of the course. Students will additionally write synopses, treatments, character sketches, and beat sheets. Designed for any student who has always wanted to write a screenplay

Focus on a particular topic or process. Work includes aspects of reading short stories and novels, writing at least 30-50 pages of fiction, and responding to peers' work in workshop. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.

Taught by the Stein Visiting Fiction Writer. Prerequisite: 90 or 91

"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.

This is an intermediate course on the art and craft of fiction writing in the young adult genre. We will read widely in the genre. The aim of our reading will be to discover principles of craft, at the sentence level and at the narrative level, that generate powerful and enduring fiction. As we read, we will work to develop a writer's definition of YA. What are the differences between great YA and other great literature? What are the best ways to understand quality in a YA text? Within what bounds, stylistic, ethical, and otherwise, are we working as practitioners of the art form? Students will begin a young adult novel and submit pages from their work to the class on a regular basis. We will convene as a workshop to discuss one another's work.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Continuation of ENGLISH 91. Reading a variety of creative essays, completing short writing exercises, and discussing narrative techniques in class. Students submit a short (2-5 page) and a longer (8-20 page) nonfictional work to be workshopped and revised. Prerequisite ENGLISH 90 or ENGLISH 91. First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

English 191DC will provide an intermediate-level course in the art and craft of writing memoir. It will build on those strategies for writing with meaning and insight about the events in our lives that were presented in English 91DC. During the term, we will read texts that broadly innovate within and outside of the formal traditions of the memoir form, finding new and exciting ways to represent personal experience. This section will also serve as the continuing examination and practice of the formal elements of the memoir. During the term, Fellows will write, workshop, present to the class, and revise at least two short pieces, one long pieces, and working drafts of excerpts. All workshops will serve as the springboard for our larger class conversation about theme and craft. During the quarter, we will meet in individual conferences. Throughout the quarter, creative work will be assigned in the form of essays, imitations, and revisions. Critical work will be assigned in the form of planning and leading class discussions, and writing and discussing critiques of colleagues¿ essays. A variety of creative prompts, critical exercises, and assigned readings will foster your understanding and appreciation of the memoir form, as well as your growth as a creative writer. Energetic, committed participation is a must.

Workshop. Special Topics continuation of 91. Focus is on forms of the essay. Works from across time and nationality for their craft and technique; experimentation with writing exercises. Students read and respond to each other's longer nonfiction projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Taught by the Stein Visiting Writer. Prerequisite English 90 or 91. Permission number required to enroll.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Students will examine a diverse range of contemporary poetry. Students write and revise several poems that will develop into a larger poetic project. Prerequisite: 92. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Generation and discussion of student poems. How to recognize a poem's internal structure; how to seek models for work. Students submit portfolio for group critique. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: ENGLISH 92.

Taught by the Mohr Visiting Poet. Prerequisite: 92. By application. Permission number required to enroll.

See section above on Undergraduate Programs, Opportunities for Advanced Work, Individual Research.

The course will be a practical workshop for undergraduates on how to improve essay-writing skills. we will focus on the finer points of vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, logic, timing, intellectual precision; how to connect with (and delight) an audience; how to magnify a theme; how to deflect counter-arguments; how to develop your own sophisticated authorial 'style'; how to write sentences (and papers!) your reader will care about and admire and maybe even remember.

Overview of literary-critical methodologies, with a practical emphasis shaped by participants' current honors projects. Restricted to students in the English Honors Program.

In two quarters.

Undergraduates who wish to study a subject or area not covered by regular courses may, with consent, enroll for individual work under the supervision of a member of the department. 198 may not be used to fulfill departmental area or elective requirements without consent. Group seminars are not appropriate for 198.

Up to three undergraduate writers work with Fiction Into Film instructors. Students design their own curriculum, and Instructors act as writing mentors and advisers. Prerequisite: 190F. By application. Submitted manuscript required.

Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in poetry, fiction, and if available, nonfiction. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Prerequisites: 90, 91, or 92; submitted manuscript in October.

Open, with department approval, to seniors majoring in non-Honors English who wish to work throughout the year on a 10,000 word critical or scholarly essay. Applicants submit a sample of their expository prose, proposed topic, and bibliography to the Director of Undergraduate Studies before preregistration in May of the junior year. Each student accepted is responsible for finding a department faculty adviser. May be repeated for credit.

Differences in translations of the Bible into English. Recognizing and interpreting biblical allusion in texts from the medieval to modern periods. Readings from the Bible and from British, Canadian, American, and African American, and African literature in English.

English-language resources have dominated the discourse of digital humanities across the globe. This course takes a broader view, focusing on the methods, tools, and discourse of digital humanities as applied to textual materials in languages other than English. Students will develop practical skills in applying digital humanities research methodologies to texts in any language of their choosing. In addition, students will become familiar with major digital humanities scholarly organizations, movements, and debates that have their origins in different linguistic and cultural identities. No prior technical or digital humanities experience required, but students must have a reading knowledge of at least one non-English language (modern or historical).

Accessing the past through the cultural record provides us with the ability to read primary sources for ourselves; and determine the reasons behind, and resources given over to, the production of documents and manuscripts. This course will introduce students to the places and spaces that created literary and historical texts, the materials and skills involved, and the methods by which these artifacts were produced. In this course, students will be introduced to the essential skills of epigraphy, paleography, codicology and diplomatics, which involve learning how to read inscriptions, manuscripts, and single-leaf documents, like writs and charters. Students will be immersed in first-hand learning in Special Collections, and will work collaboratively on a project that brings to light thoroughly interpreted and edited early textual materials from archive to publication.

Focus is on Shakespeare's Hamlet as a site of rich critical controversy from the eighteenth century to the present. Aim is to read, discuss, and evaluate different approaches to the play, from biographical, theatrical, and psychological to formalist, materialist, feminist, new historicist, and, most recently, quantitative. The ambition is to see whether there can be great literature without (a) great (deal of) criticism. The challenge is to understand the theory of literature through the study of its criticism.

A slow and careful reading of Herman Melville's 1850 masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. In the process, we will unfold the novel's nineteenth-century literary-historical context as well as the world of Melville's own literary, religious, philosophical, technological, commercial, and scientific citations and allusions. We will seek to understand the multiple significances of Melville's experiments with the novelistic genre and their relationship with his building out the meaning of Americanness. In the second half of the quarter, we will focus on a selection of major mid-twentieth-century through contemporary critical, literary-theoretical, and political-theoretical readings of Moby-Dick.

This seminar will examine narratives of sexual consent in light of the #MeToo movement in America. Considering shifting models and standards of consent in relation to changing cultural awareness about harassment, violence, and abuse, the class will study how consent is construed as a narrative, the history of consent culture on campus and in sex education, approaches to consent developed by minority sexual cultures, and intersectional approaches to consent, among other topics. Readings will be cross-disciplinary and will include legal theory, sociology, psychology, contemporary journalism, essays, and fiction.

We will read a series of plays set in or around early modern London, written by playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston. The course will explore the plays¿ hilarious representations of the London underworld, with its confidence tricksters and naive victims, as well as more serious topics such as social mobility and social relations, economic expansion, disease transmission, and the built environment. Plays studied will include: The Alchemist, Epicene, The Roaring Girl, A Chaste Maid In Cheapside, The Dutch Courtesan.

The course will deal with a number of eighteenth-century English women writers--primarily novelists, but also poets, critics and playwrights. Authors to be studied in depth will include both relatively well-known writers such as Behn and Wollstonecraft, and lesser-known authors such as Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Inchbald and Anna Seward. Considerable attention will be paid to recent feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century women's writing, generic issues and the question of a "women's literary tradition," the material conditions of female authorship in the period, and the history of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace.

A reading class for those studying Paradise Lost in its entirety for the first time. A close reading of this very long poem, plus study of pertinent Miltonic prose, as well as historical background and classic interpretive essays.

The course will survey some of the major texts and authors of eighteenth-century British literature. No previous knowledge of the period is required. Particular topics we will address will include: the social and historical backgrounds of eighteenth-century literature, satire and the rise of the novel, the relationship between "elite" art and popular culture, literature and the visual arts (Hogarth), the rise of new critical approaches to works of the period.

Why do women write memoirs? Why has the memoir form become such a popular genre for American female authors? What do such books reveal, More broadly, about the condition of women in Contemporary Society? We will approach these questions by reading autobiographical works by some if not all of the following writers: Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion, Kathryn Harris, Audre Lorde, Patti Smith, Lucy Grealy, Michelle Tea, Jeannette Walls, Carrie Fisher, and Alison Bechdel.

Workshop critique of original short stories or novel. Prerequisites: manuscript, consent of instructor, and 190-level fiction workshop. nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

Focus is on generation and discussion of student poems, and seeking published models for the work.

An overview of translation theories and practices over time. The aesthetic, ethical, and political questions raised by the act and art of translation and how these pertain to the translator's tasks. Discussion of particular translation challenges and the decision processes taken to address these issues. Coursework includes assigned theoretical readings, comparative translations, and the undertaking of an individual translation project.

An introduction to the essential tool-kit for medievalists, this course will give all medievalists a great head start in knowing how to access and interpret major works and topics in the field. Stanford's medieval faculty will explain the key sources and methods in the major disciplines from History to Religion, French to Arabic, English to Chinese, and Art History to German and Music. In so doing, students will be introduced to the breadth and interdisciplinary potential of Medieval Studies. A workshop devoted to Digital Technologies and Codicology/Palaeography will offer elementary training in these fundamental skills.

The course considers the English and European prose fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--romances, picaresques, pastorals, narratives of social class, and other genres--in the context of Renaissance and present-day theories of fiction. How is narrative form conditioned by social reality, and in turn how does it provide a zone for reflection on that reality in terms different from those of the more codified genres of drama and poetry?

Is there a boundary between fact and fiction? Is fiction a stable category at all? Should we be thinking instead about description, factual reference, the place of history, and the methods of science? This course will examine the ways in which fictions figure in the workings of the human mind and human institutions, as well as in literature. Readings will include work by philosophers and critics stretching from Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith, to twentieth-century figures such as Vaihinger (the philosophy of "as if"), to "possible worlds" theory. Bruno Latour, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Ann Banfield will be joined by Catherine Gallagher and narratologists. In reaching back to the eighteenth century, we also can have in mind important essays or prefaces by such writers as Horace Walpole, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Anne Radcliffe. Novels, of course, raise large questions about fictionality. Works for study include: The Female Quixote, The Castle of Otranto, Tristram Shandy, and Sense and Sensibility.

"Whiteness" has been a sign of the universal, the unmarked, the taken-for-granted, the default; it indexes privilege, divinity, beauty, cultural superiority, moral authority, and oppressive domination. As the folk saying went: "white is right." This interdisciplinary course takes up case studies in literature, art, photography, film and performance that both revisit and go beyond the whiteness studies of the 1990s to consider its vast, elastic utility within the modern imagination as well as its urgent contemporary relevance to ask: "why white now?"

Introduction to the critical skills required for working in the archives. Students will be taught the core methods for working with archival sources, and will be trained in the transcription, editing, interpretation, and publication of primary textual materials. Our textual materials will be generically varied and chronologically diverse, and we shall move from late medieval to contemporary holdings in Stanford University Library¿s Special Collections, in other archives at Stanford, and in local private holdings.

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 welcomed.

This course will help students build a template for rigorous interdisciplinary writing. It uses a series of case studies to reveal the disparate ways in which literary study and its social-scientific ¿others¿ have approached the problems of narrative and representation. In doing so, the course engages enduring theoretical questions about the nature of communication and the risks of encounters that cross divides of culture, class, and language. Students will use insights from class to develop a narrative project of their own, which may take the form of traditional seminar paper or a grant proposal to support further research.

Accessing the past through the cultural record provides us with the ability to read primary sources for ourselves; and determine the reasons behind, and resources given over to, the production of documents and manuscripts. This course will introduce students to the places and spaces that created literary and historical texts, the materials and skills involved, and the methods by which these artifacts were produced. In this course, students will be introduced to the essential skills of epigraphy, paleography, codicology and diplomatics, which involve learning how to read inscriptions, manuscripts, and single-leaf documents, like writs and charters. Students will be immersed in first-hand learning in Special Collections, and will work collaboratively on a project that brings to light thoroughly interpreted and edited early textual materials from archive to publication.

Performance theory through topics including: affect/trauma, embodiment, empathy, theatricality/performativity, specularity/visibility, liveness/disappearance, belonging/abjection, and utopias and dystopias. Readings from Schechner, Phelan, Austin, Butler, Conquergood, Roach, Schneider, Silverman, Caruth, Fanon, Moten, Anzaldúa, Agamben, Freud, and Lacan. May be repeated for credit.

Focus is on Virgil's Aeneid and its influence, tracing the European epic tradition (Ariosto, Tasso, Camoes, Spenser, and Milton) to New World discovery and mercantile expansion in the early modern period.

A survey of American literature told through the history of an important, complex, and neglected genre, the short story cycle, ranging from Washington Irving¿s Tales of a Traveller (1824) to William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942).  Other authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson.  The course will introduce students to the patterns of American literary development, its social and cultural contexts, and the major critical/theoretical lenses through which it has been understood.  In particular, 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.

Varieties of literary irony from Plato through the present. Topics include: verbal, dramatic, situational, and romantic irony. Focus will be on questions about what irony is and why writers use it. How does irony go astray? What kinds of topics seem to require irony? How does irony work? Writers include Chaucer, Swift, Thomas Mann, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace.

Most of the time, writing a pitch for a popular outlet just means writing an email. So why be intimidated? This course will outline the procedure for pitching essays and articles to popular media: how to convince an editor, agent, or anyone else that your idea is compelling, relevant, and deliverable. We'll take a holistic approach to self-presentation that includes presenting yourself with confidence, optimizing your social media and web platform, networking effectively, writing excellent queries and pitches, avoiding the slush pile, and perhaps most importantly, persevering through the inevitable self-doubt and rejection.We will focus on distinguishing the language, topics and hooks of popular media writing from those of academic writing, learn how to target and query editors on shortform pieces (personal essays, news stories, etc.), and explore how humanists can effectively self-advocate and get paid for their work.

The course elucidates sixteenth-century English poetry in a continental context. While narrative and discursive poetry will be explored, the emphasis is on lyric poetry, and the continuous focus is on generic experimentation from several distinctive standpoints: e.g. Petrarchism; the plain style; psalters, religious lyrics, and contrafacta; lyric sequences and other fictions of scale; and socially (but not necessarily poetically) marginal voices. Even where the course broaches conventional material, there will be an effort to redefine the questions that animate the field.

Provides students with an overview of some major genres in the history of the modern novel, along with major theorists in the critical understanding of the form. Novels might include works by Cervantes, Defoe, Lafayette, Radcliffe, Goethe, Scott, Balzac, Melville, and Woolf. Theorists might include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Jameson, Gallagher, Barthes, Kristeva, and Bourdieu. *PLEASE NOTE: Course for graduate students only.*

This course will explore the illuminated world of William Blake poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist in the context of intellectual history, culture, and aesthetics. To study Blake is to witness the birth pangs of modernity and the pathos energy and agony of alternate, impossible histories that fell by the wayside. The task is multidisciplinary, and it is one that opens literary history into our contemporary moment. Blake challenges virtually every aspect of literary representation, from character to narrative structure, from poetic meter to typology and other features of print culture. He is historical in his situatedness (religious dissent, the chemical revolution, industrialization, commodification, and controversies about human and animal rights were all part of his milieu) but he is also radically present in his ongoing influence and relevance. The course will unpack Blake's iconography, ideology, mythology, and infernal method which made every illuminated book a unique work of art.

This course serves as the Core Seminar for the PhD Minor in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. It introduces students to a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy with literary and arts criticism. The seminar is intended for graduate students. It is suitable for theoretically ambitious students of literature and the arts, philosophers with interests in value theory, aesthetics, and topics in language and mind, and other students with strong interest in the psychological importance of engagement with the arts. May be repeated for credit. In this year¿s installment, we focus on how artistic kinds or genres help set the terms on which individual works are experienced, understood, and valued, with special attention to lyric poetry and music.

Emphasis on world-system theory, theories of coloniality and power, and aesthetic modernity/postmodernity in their relation to culture broadly understood.

The fate of lyric in nineteenth-century British Literature. An expansion of the traditional category of lyric to include both narrative and dramatic forms of poetry, yielding such hybrid forms as lyrical ballads and lyricized epic fragments, on the one hand, and monodrama, dramatic monologues, conversation poems, and Romantic closet drama, on the other. The transformation of the courtly form of the sonnet into vehicles of domesticated sentiment, and the emergence of sprung rhythm and symbolism by century¿s end.

We will read a series of plays set in or around early modern London, written by playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston. The course will explore the plays¿ hilarious representations of the London underworld, with its confidence tricksters and naive victims, as well as more serious topics such as social mobility and social relations, economic expansion, disease transmission, and the built environment. Plays studied will include: The Alchemist, Epicene, The Roaring Girl, A Chaste Maid In Cheapside, The Dutch Courtesan.

Exploration of various post45 literary phenomena with special attention to broader conceptual models in and by which they might be interpreted.

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. Within the last decade there has, however, been an explosion of energy in the field, which has expanded beyond the boundaries of the literary text narrowly conceived and incorporated a range of other genres and humanistic approaches. Several recent or forthcoming books survey the range of emerging scholarship and the potential for new directions within the field.  Using one of these--New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford, 2017)--as a guide, this course will delve into a variety of topics that law and literature approaches can illuminate. These include, among others, conceptions of sovereignty and non-sovereign collectivities, the construction of the citizen and refugee, competing visions of marriage and its alternatives, law and the rhetorical tradition, and theoretical perspectives on intellectual property. Nearly every session will pair recent scholarship in the field with a literary or artistic work, ranging from Claudia Rankine's Citizen to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Students taking the course for R credit can take the course for either 3 or 4 units, depending on the paper length.  This class is limited to 22 students, with an effort made to have students from SLS (16 students will be selected by lottery) and six non-law students by consent of instructor.  Elements used in grading:  Attendance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. Cross-listed with the Law School (LAW 3517).

The computational study of literature allows us to analyze literature across vastly different scales: from extremely detailed word frequencies, to massive archives of texts. But how does criticism operate at these two extremes? How do new methods of analysis respond to the theories of reading offered by literary criticism? In this class, we will compare the scalar modes of reading that our new methods offer with historical theories of critical reading practices, from hermeneutics, to close reading, and beyond.

Primary reading in Freud, Lacan, Laplanche, Irigaray and Kristeva. Secondary readings in film theory (Mulvey to Silverman), art history (Bryson, Bersani) and poststructuralism (Derrida, Foucault, Butler).

Literary studies has long had a wide array of methods for theorizing the past. In more recent years, scholars have begun to theorize the future with equal energy. But what do we talk about when we talk about the future? Events that might happen, the way the thought of the future affects our actions today, or something more? We will discuss queer futurities, Afrofuturism, ecological futurity, revolutionary futures, reception and the futures of texts, and more.

ntellectual CLR James was an insatiable reader of world literature, but the literature and popular culture of the United States claimed a special place in his imagination. This seminar reads American literature from the mid-nineteenth- (Melville, Whitman) to the late-twentieth centuries (Wright, Morrison, Alice Walker) alongside James¿s literary criticism and political thought. Recent critical and theoretical texts will supplement these primary readings.

In an essay from his book The Flesh of Words, Jacques Rancière refers to the suspensive existence of literature. This seminar will be devoted to an in-depth consideration of the possible meanings of this phrase. At issue for us will be the suspension of the normative assumption that the fundamental difference between a person (the author, the reader) and a fictional character is that the former has being while the latter does not. The syllabus will feature a sub-genre of the novel that disturbs this normative assumption by explicitly staging the collapse of the divide between actual and fictional being, flesh and word, author and character, through an extended representation of the porosity of those categories on every level of the text structural, characterological, and narratological. The result is the development of a metafictional discourse within the fiction itself that narrates a crossing-over of the author's material actuality with the immateriality of character. We'll examine the forms of crossing-over, its particular temporal and spatial conditions, and its ethical consequences and philosophical implications both within and outside the novel.

Investigation of the problematic production of an American national literature in the antebellum period. Readings include generically diverse range of texts in which the particular requirements of an ¿American¿ authorship are specifically at issue. Focus upon various theories and problems of authorship as they appear explicitly or implicitly in the fiction, poetry, correspondence, and criticism of the period. These issues include the impact of the democratic-revolutionary legacy upon the development of American literary form; the rise of a literary cultural elite and its importance to the formation of an American public sphere; elite anxieties concerning the marginal status of United States literature in relation to European culture; the consequent marginalization of ¿Americanness¿ as that which resists cultural development; the literary appropriation of ¿commonness¿ as central to the representation of national character; theories of ¿the popular voice¿ and the textual emergence of voices resistant to such theories.

Survey of American literature exploring the relationship between ¿problem texts¿--works that raise significant formal difficulties--and major problems in US history. Attention to social and cultural contexts, and to critical and theoretical debates.

An exploration of the some of the main currents in post-WWII and contemporary literary theory from the new criticism to deconstruction, new historicism, etc., arriving at contemporary debates about surface reading, digital humanities, affect, and the new materialisms.

Major examples of Shakespearean, Neo-classical, bourgeois, Idealist, and Romantic drama from 1600 to 1800 studied in tandem with the aesthetic and dramatic theories that underwrite them. Dramatists include Shakespeare, Addison, Lillo, Home, Schiller, and Joanna Baillie. Theorists include Dryden, Addison, Lessing, Diderot, Hume, Adam Smith, Schiller, and Baillie.

A close study of Shakespeare's major tragedies and exemplary criticism from the Restoration to the present.

This interdisciplinary and reading-intensive course has been designed to familiarize you with the key scholars, as well as the most recent developments, in theorizations of race and ethnicity in literary and cultural studies, performance studies, visual studies, and philosophy. As we work our way through this diverse set of readings, particular attention will be paid to how the various approaches illuminate key issues under current debate: subjectivity, identity, biological difference, racial representation, affect, and political activism.

Through intensive close reading of Joyce's novel along with selected theoretical texts, we will examine the formal structures and cultural and political implications of Ulysses. Topics will include modernist aesthetics and narrative innovation, depictions of consciousness, gender and sexuality, vernacular modernism, and the sensorium of modernity.

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.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

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

Three or more graduate students who wish in the following quarter to study a subject or an area not covered by regular courses and seminars may plan an informal seminar and approach a member of the department to supervise it.

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, Modern Thought and Literature and Comparative Literature. Preparation for surviving as teaching assistants in undergraduate literature courses. Focus is on leading discussions and grading papers.

For English Ph.D. candidates only. A practical and theoretical study of the genre of the journal article, with critical reflection on its status as a gateway to academic professionalization and as a highly specialized form of public address. We will be reading articles published over the last decade across a diverse range of journals, focusing on issues surrounding methodology, style, tone, and audience. Participants will work on developing an already polished piece of writing into the form of an article publishable by a peer-reviewed publication. Admission by application in Autumn quarter .

This two-quarter-long reading group will alternate from week-to-week between Old English Biblical and Elegaic Poetry and David Jones¿s twentieth-century transnational Modernist masterpiece, "Anathemata" (which W. H. Auden called very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century). Students can choose to join biweekly for just Old English (in the original language) or just David Jones, or complete both sets of allied reading.

A special subject of investigation under supervision of a member of the department. Thesis work is not registered under this number.

Qualifying Exam Workshop for 1st year cohort

Students revise and develop a paper under the supervision of a faculty member with a view to possible publication.

For third- and fourth-year graduate students in English. Strategies for studying for and passing the oral examination, publishing articles, and for writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. May be repeated for credit.

For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisers required.