ENGLISH 1C:
Comics: More than Words (DLCL 238, FILMEDIA 38)
This research unit looks at Comics from a transnational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. Each quarter we organize a series of lectures, reading sessions, and workshops around a main topic. Some previous topics that we have explored are: Postcolonialism and Decoloniality (Fall 2021), Feminisms (Winter 2022), and Superheroes (Spring 2022). This year we plan on exploring topics such as Mangas (Fall 2022), Computer Science (Winter 2023), and Comic Theory (Spring 2023). We gather three times per quarter on Zoom or in person. To earn the unit, students must attend all events hosted during the quarter, do the readings in advance of the meeting, and participate actively in the discussion.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
20 times
(up to 20 units total)
ENGLISH 1D:
Dickens Reading
Through the academic year, we will read one Dickens novel, one number a week for 19 weeks, as the Victorians would have done as they read the serialized novel over the course of 19 months. The group gets together once a week for an hour and a half to discuss each number, to look carefully at the pattern that the author is weaving, to guess, as the Victorians would have done, what might be coming next, and to investigate the Victorian world Dickens presents. We look carefully at themes, characters, metaphorical patterns, and scenes that form Dickens' literary world, and spend increasing time evaluating the critique that Dickens levels at Victorian life. The weekly gatherings are casual; the discussion is lively and pointed.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 1G:
The Gothic: Transcultural, Multilingual, and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Genre
Description: This course is a research platform for the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the Gothic literary and cinematic genres. We consider the Gothic to have rich traditions whose contributions to Queer and LGBTQ+ studies, cultural theory, political economy, bio-ethics, and techno-science, remain under-explored. By looking at the world from the peripheralized standpoints of the monstrous, the abject, the dark, the uncanny, and the tumultuous, the Gothic offers unique though often overlooked critical insights into modern societies. Students enrolled in this course will participate in research activities and reading discussions oriented towards crafting interdisciplinary Gothic syllabi for the future and a cross-cultural Encyclopedia of the Gothic.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 5AA:
Queer(ing) Asian American Literature
When "inadmissible" desires and "illegible" racial identities intersect, what do their complex entanglements make visible? What histories do they illuminate? What other worlds do they make possible? Thinking with Alexander Chee's Edinburgh (2000), Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003), and Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), this course explores queer Asian American literary narratives as imperatives for fuller understandings of Asian American racial and sexual identities - and as critical interventions in the Asian American literary canon. Drawing in supplementary short stories, poetry, and art, as well as readings in criticism and theory, we will also consider: how might the doubly "inscrutable" figure of the queer Asian American destabilize the very boundaries of "Asian America" itself? No previous exposure to Asian American critique or queer theory expected: students of all backgrounds are welcome. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 5BA:
Reading and Writing in the Digital Age
In this course, we will ask how acts of reading, writing, and interpretation change across different mediums, softwares, platforms, and contexts. The digital turn has fractured the historical connection between literature and the printed page, and rooted our everyday writing on seemingly immaterial mediums. So, why do we still read physical books in a world where practically all text has been digitized, a world where we have Red Dead Redemption and Wikipedia? What is the book as a literary object doing today? How have digital-age writers?particularly writers of color?reimagined the book as a means for representing historical trauma through experiments in image and typography? How, more broadly, has the digitization of communication transformed or displaced literary forms and experiences? What even is 'literary writing' (or, for that matter, 'academic writing')? To explore these questions, we will consider various mediums of reading and writing?including letters (Emily Dickinson and Eminem), artists' books (Edward Ruscha and Rupi Kaur), sound (Amiri Baraka, Kendrick Lamar, Tracie Morris), video games (Emily is Away, Doki Doki Literature Club!), fan fiction, and more?drawing on readings in media studies and reader response theory as critical frameworks for our inquiries. To supplement these readings, we will experiment with writing in several forms and platforms, exploring how different media both constrain and enable unique forms of expression and interpretation. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5CA:
WISE: Anti-Social Heroes in the Nineteenth Century
In this course, we will consider how unsociability, or anti-sociability, became a major literary trope of modernity. Reading texts by Jane Austen (Emma), James Hogg (Confessions of a Justified Sinner), and Charles Baudelaire (a translated selection of poetry and prose), we will encounter such figures as the outcast, the egotist, and the fl¿neur, and ask how they came to predominate the literary imagination. We will also engage with a variety of critical approaches as we explore questions about the aesthetics and politics of unsociability and the modern social configurations in which they took shape. With Hogg, we will think about political voice and the scapegoat's ironic mode of social critique. With Austen, we will attend to the nexus of narrative, competition, and civility, as we consider the gendered division of forms of unsociability. With Baudelaire, we will turn to the modern city and explore the psychology and philosophy underpinning its emerging cultural heroes. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5DA:
WISE: Poetic Intelligences
In a recent column on A.I. chatbots, Ezra Klein writes that their "'thinking,' for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human" (The New York Times, March 12, 2023). Implicit in Klein's argument is the assumption that we do understand human thinking, or at least how to recognize it, and that A.I. confronts us with something radically different masquerading as the familiar. But perhaps the world has long been populated by different kinds of thinkers. That appears to be the claim of a number of critics working on poetry, who posit that poems are their own kinds of thinking machines, with the ability to represent a speaker's thinking, to facilitate a reader's thinking, to formulate the structure of thinking, or even to think for themselves. In this course, we'll examine such claims by close reading poems from a range of writers while also engaging works of criticism that grapple with these questions from formalist, phenomenological, and philosophical perspectives. We'll ask what it might mean to say that poems think and whether they can help us think about thinking in general, including in the context of recent developments in A.I. technology. We'll also consider our own role as thinkers and writers in a world in which the practices of thinking and writing are changing faster than ever before. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact judithr@stanford.edu.)
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 5EA:
WISE: Haunted Reading: Intertextuality, Adaptation, and the Gothic
What makes a narrative "Gothic"? One defining feature is the way the past seeps into the present, whether as ghosts, crumbling castles, or even old letters left behind for future readers. Across centuries, we see these tropes again and again, reimagined so that each new story is different but, at the same time, seems to remember and respond to the Gothic stories that came before it. This course will explore the relationships that Gothic texts have to each other. What can Frankenstein, with its multiple narrators, show us about how narratives pass from person to person? How does the contemporary bestseller Mexican Gothic address the colonial histories beneath older Romantic and Victorian narratives? And why might one turn a ghost story by Henry James from the end of the 19th century into a 21st-century Netflix series? In all of these cases, the Gothic effects of "haunted reading" allow the past's hidden ghosts and monstrous meanings to emerge, visibly changed and seeking attention. As we consider how old reading can influence or even "haunt" the new, we will reflect on our own reading habits in both personal and academic contexts while simultaneously investigating how intertextuality and adaptation relate to our own critical writing and original interpretations. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact judithr@stanford.edu.)
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 5FA:
The Romance and its Readers
What does it mean for a text to be "realistic" or "unrealistic"? Why does it feel natural to us, as readers, to evaluate a book based on its ability to represent "reality"? Then again, why attempt to reproduce the real when you could simply put the book down and walk outside? In this course, we will consider these questions through the lens of "the romance." Though extremely variable across time, the romance emerges time and again as the genre of the unreal or decidedly fictional. Here are the books, we are told, that lead to fantasy and self-delusion. Reexamining such judgments, we will read a selection of "romances" - ranging from saints' lives to lesbian pulp fiction and the contemporary romance novel - while also devoting attention to the romance-reader (as a supposedly deluded and ineffectual participant in reality) to explore the development of the novel as a category and to trouble our understandings of "real" and "unreal" modes of experience and representation. How has the romance historically been used to reject, distort, or transform reality? What gender - or other - biases inform the perennial devaluation of the romance as escapist fluff? What might it mean? What insights into literary history and politics emerge? if we take the romance and its readers seriously? (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 5GA:
Shakespeare and His Critics
In this seminar, we delve into foundational topics in Shakespearean drama, Shakespeare Studies, and literary theory by reading key plays alongside touchstone analyses drawn from the major critical schools of the twentieth century. Each class pairs dramatic verse with academic argument, introducing theatrical characters alongside prominent scholars. Primary texts include Hamlet, As You Like It, and Richard III. Secondary works survey historicist, psychoanalytic, new critical, post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives, among others. By the end of the quarter, students will have expanded their understanding of Shakespeare and of literary criticism and will have developed their competencies as critics in their own rights. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu)
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 5K:
WISE: The Cult of Jack Kerouac (And Other Stories of Literary Celebrity)
This course explores the rise, stakes, and ironies of literary stardom by focusing on one of the Bay Area's most notorious band of celebrity authors: the Beats. To some, Beat politics, styles, and philosophies have seemed dated for decades; and yet Beat writers maintain a weirdly broad staying power. Even now, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg remain pop-cultural touchstones, outsider-intellectual icons, and essential reading for teens and the highly educated. To get to the root of this phenomenon, we will consider what fame meant to literature and vice versa in the post-World War II era - a time when a rapidly changing media ecology, rising consumerism, and intensifying Cold War nationalism made for curious marriages: between avant-garde art and pop culture, between countercultural ambitions and commercial appropriation. Why did the Beats get famous? How did their fame affect the life and work of contemporaries (like the acclaimed but understudied poet Bernadette Mayer) who wrote in their long shadow? What can these dynamics teach us about celebrity and technology today? In answering these questions, we will examine Beat writers in print, on film and TV, in photographs and advertisements, and in the archive. Students will learn to work with a range of genres and forms including some criticism and theory by authors both inside and outside of the literary 'star system.' (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5P:
WISE: Literature and the Internet
It is widely held that the term 'cyberspace' first appeared not in the giddy reports of business consultants or futurologists, but in a short story by science fiction author William Gibson. Literature has long functioned as a kind of incubator for some of the most important concepts and metaphors that we use to understand the massive transformations that digital technologies have effected within modern life. In this class, we will read novels, short stories, and poetry from the last fifty years that try to capture the new forms of experience that these technologies' considered broadly under the rubric of 'the internet' have brought into being. Drawing on media-theoretical and Marxist approaches in particular, we will work together to develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing the two-way traffic between digital media and literary forms, from cyberpunk fiction to Instagram poetry. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5R:
WISE: American Picaresque: Identity and Satire in the 20th Century
"I am an invisible man," says the unnamed hero of Ralph Ellison's classic picaresque novel from 1952. Generically picaresque refers to works of satirical fiction that depict the episodic adventures of a likable roguish hero. This course will explore 20th-century American variations on the genre, focusing on three novels that feature seemingly invisible half-outsiders on the move through different settings and social spheres. What do these narratives suggest about the politics of visibility and marginalization? How do they employ satire, ridicule, wordplay, and irony to expose social corruption, hypocrisy, ignorance, and greed? How do they use a picaresque hero's half-outsider status to probe questions of equality and belonging based on race, gender, class, and ability? What do they suggest about the possibility of social acceptance for someone with a marginalized identity? We'll let these and other questions motivate our tour of 20th-century American picaresque and at the same time learn how the picaresque can help us understand literary history more broadly. Novels include Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1927), Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952), and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta (1974). Critics and theorists may include Mikhail Bakhtin, Claudio Guillén, Susan Lanser, and Michael Hames-García. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 5S:
WISE: Thoreau and His Readers
"Some historical phenomena need large-scale analysis," writes literary critic Wai-Chee Dimock. In this course, we will take Dimock's invitation as we study the far-reaching resonances of a text that might seem parochial: Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Thoreau's account of his 'experiment in living' for two years at Walden Pond proved polarizing when he first published it in 1854. Even today Thoreau can be read as either dangerously self-indulgent or radically self-reliant. But while his political thought is often associated with modern libertarianism, it has also shaped an active, deeply egalitarian form of civic engagement from the nineteenth century on. Indeed, the themes that cut across Walden and that anchor Thoreau's speeches and essays on civil disobedience have made him a writer with a direct influence on such twentieth-century revolutionaries as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, Thoreau has played a foundational role in the development of environmental thought and ethics. In this course, we will read Walden slowly, pairing Thoreau's work with the contributions of other writers and activists whose work either references or resonates with Thoreau's, from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Bringing a comparative lens to topics ranging from abolitionism to environmentalism, we will consider the historical contexts and trajectories of these movements and attempt to articulate our own sense of ethical and political responsibility in the twenty-first century. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5T:
WISE: Renaissance Word Play
Sparknotes' No Fear Shakespeare series promises to "translate" the Bard. CliffsNotes and Shmoop offer similar services. But what is it about early modern English that demands translation? Even in modern editions, with their standardized spellings and explanatory footnotes, the language of the Renaissance still feels unsettled and, at times, unsettling. This was a period of unprecedented linguistic play and unmatched verbal chaos. Authors revised, razed, and even invented languages to accommodate realities actual and imagined. This course explores their innovations. Three texts will guide our exploration of semantics, semiotics, and rhetoric: Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Book One of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590), and Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy (1595). Along the way, we will consult classical, medieval, early modern, and contemporary philosophers and critics who interrogate language, its aspirations, and its failings. Secondary readings will pair Plato, Cicero, and Erasmus, with Freud, Foucault, and Derrida, among others.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5U:
WISE: The Institutions of World Literature
Pick a work of "World Literature" from your bookshelf. Now ask yourself - how did it come to be yours? Did a friend recommend it? A bookstore? A professor? Amazon? And how did you come to think of it as "World Literature"? Did publisher decisions on the book cover, blurb, or summary tell you that? Was it marketed as such on a class syllabus? Was it on the Booker Prize shortlist? This course asks questions about the production, dissemination, and consumption of World Literature through three primary texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison (a syllabus classic), The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola (the first internationally recognized Nigerian novel in English), and The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew (a graphic novel criticized by the Singaporean government). Through the reading and contextual examination of each text, we will explore how these texts come to our attention in the first place, how we have been taught to aesthetically value them, and how we have come to classify them as "World Literature." What identifying and gate-keeping mechanisms, what historical contingencies and systemic inequalities, comprise a work's "worldliness"?
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 5V:
WISE: Haunted Daughters: Race, Gender, and the Family in Gothic Fiction
At its heart, the gothic is about the intrusion of the past into the present. It grapples with what happens when the dead haunt the living or past injustices refuse to stay buried. In this course, we will explore the interplay of race, gender, trauma, ancestry, and haunted domestic spaces. Linking a selection of short ghost stories by earlier writers to more recent novels by women authors of color, we will trace permutations of women's gothic writing from 1861 to 2020, focusing especially on how 20th and 21st century women authors of color utilize, subvert, redirect, and interrogate the genre. Assigned novels will include Toni Morrison's classic Beloved, Yangsze Choo's Ghost Bride, and Silvia Morena Garcia's bestselling Mexican Gothic. Earlier texts will include stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Throughout the course, we will ask: why is the gothic such a powerful outlet for women's voices? How do ghost stories explore themes of intergenerational trauma, cultural oppression, and violence? What does it mean for a home or family to be haunted? What do haunted daughters owe to the ghosts of their cultural or familial pasts?
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 5W:
WISE: Detective Fiction
What do detective stories reveal about the structure of society? What can mystery writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Chester Himes, and Patricia Highsmith teach us about the structure of literature? On the one hand, detectives have special access to the social worlds represented in fiction. As we'll see, solving a crime often means charting a course through the many sub-worlds of urban life, from penthouse to flophouse. The private eye can enter communities that would otherwise be closed to outsiders, social groups set apart by differences like race, class, gender, or sexuality. On the other hand, detective fiction also dramatizes the act of reading itself as a social relationship, at once a contract and a game between author and reader. In exchange for our time and attention, we expect the author to play fair, provide clues, and give us a logically sound and satisfying ending. This course uses detective fiction as an introduction to a structuralist approach to narrative, and as an occasion to discuss the big questions: the relationship between self and society and the pleasures and responsibilities therein.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 9CE:
Creative Expression in Writing
Primary focus on giving students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. Students will come out of the course strengthened in their ability to identify and pursue their own creative interests. For undergrads only. NOTE: For undergraduates only. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
Instructors: ;
Beaty, G. (PI);
Brewer, W. (PI);
Ekiss, K. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Nguyen, H. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Shewmaker, M. (PI);
Tomar, R. (PI);
Trahan, J. (PI)
ENGLISH 9CF:
Poetry Into Film
This course focuses on the intersection between film and poetry. Students will complete three short films based on both published and student-authored poems. From concept to final cut, students will script, storyboard, soundtrack, and visually design each production before filming, editing, and screening their films for class. As such, the course will serve as an introduction to both poetry and digital filmmaking.nNOTE: Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CFS:
Fire Stories: Narrative in the Digital Age
How do we tell stories in the age of the internet, social media, and new technology? How has the art of storytelling evolved over time? In this Creative Writing course we will explore storytelling in the digital age. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own personal projects, and considering ways in which storytelling has shifted from oral traditions to modern iterations like podcasts, songwriting, filmmaking, and multimedia. Assignments will range from reading Justin Torres' novel, 'We the Animals,' to watching films like 'Birdman' and 'La Jet¿e.' We will be listening to albums, looking at photo essays, and frequently meeting outdoors to tell stories around a fire. Anyone with a sense of adventure is welcome!
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CI:
Inspired By Science: A Writing Workshop
How can your interest in science and the environment be enriched by a regular creative practice? How do you begin to write a poem or essay about the wonders of the natural world or the nuances of climate change? What are the tools and strategies available to creative writers, and how can these techniques be used to communicate complex concepts and research to wide-audiences? We begin to answer these questions by drawing inspiration from the rich tradition of scientists who write and writers who integrate science. Emphasizing writing process over finished product, students maintain journals throughout the quarter, responding to daily prompts that encourage both practice and play. Through open-ended and exploratory writing, along with specific exercises to learn the writer's craft students develop a sense of their own style and voice. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CP:
Writing Off the Page: Songwriting, Film, and Spoken Word
With recent blockbuster films like Patterson and major prizes being awarded to artists like Bob Dylan and Kendrick Lamar, the borders of what constitutes traditional literature are shifting. In this Creative Writing course we will be looking at literature `off the page,' in songwriting, spoken word, multi-media, and visual art. We will be workshopping our own creative projects and exploring the boundaries of contemporary literature. Artists we'll be looking at include Iron and Wine, Lil Wayne, Allen Ginsberg, Beyonce, David Lynch, Patti Smith, Mark Strand, Anne Carson, Danez Smith, Bon Iver, and Lou Reed. For undergraduates only. NOTE: Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CV:
Creative Expression in Writing
Online workshop whose primary focus is to give students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. Students will come out of the course strengthened in their ability to identify and pursue their own creative interests.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CW:
Writing and World Literature
This course is an introduction to reading and writing short fiction and poetry. For inspiration and imitation, students will read models drawn from a diverse body of global literature. In a supportive, discussion-based environment, students will develop their own creativity and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. Students will come out of the course strengthened in their ability to identify and pursue their own creative interests.nNOTE: Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CWA:
Word/Art
This class will explore the interconnectivity of writing and visual art by asking the question, what is possible in the relationship between text and image? We'll look at concrete and graphic poetry, comics and graphic nonfiction; as well as chapbooks, broadsides, erasures, visual alphabets and syllabaries, and even tarot cards. In this process we'll conceive broader questions about language and representation: what can words do that visual images cannot and vice versa; what capacities does each have for conjuring reality; what becomes imaginable only when text and image fuse? Students will have the opportunity to try out a number of small-scale exercises, as well as to craft a sustained word/art project. They will come away with a new understanding of their own relationship(s) to language, and an expanded sense of possibility in their creative practice. No experience with writing or visual art is necessary though students should be prepared to experiment as both writers and visual artists. For undergraduates only.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9R:
Humanities Research Intensive
Everyone knows that scientists do research, but how do you do research in the humanities? This seven-day course, taught over spring break, will introduce you to the excitement of humanities research, while preparing you to develop an independent summer project or to work as a research assistant for a Stanford professor. Through hands-on experience with archival materials and museum collections, you will learn how to formulate a solid research question; how to gather the evidence that will help you to answer that question; how to write up research results; how to critique the research of your fellow students; how to deliver your results in a public setting; and how to write an effective grant proposal. Students who complete this course become Humanities Research Intensive Fellows and receive post-program mentorship during spring quarter, ongoing opportunities to engage with faculty and advanced undergraduates, and eligibility to apply for additional funding to support follow-up research. Freshmen, sophomores, and qualifying transfer students only. All majors and undeclared students welcome. No prior research experience necessary. Enrollment limited: apply in October at https://humanexperience.stanford.edu/undergraduates/humanities-research-intensive.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 9SF:
Fight the Future: Speculative Fiction and Social Justice
Imagining the future has been one of the most important ways humans have assessed their present. In this salon-style seminar we'll focus on modern speculative fiction as social critique, especially of regimes of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. The course will be devoted to new and established writers of speculative fiction -- broadly defined and across era and geography -- whose work engages with oppression and freedom, sex, love, and other dynamics of power. We will also devote one night per week to film screenings of classic and contemporary films in the genre. Guest lecturers will discuss the work of authors such as Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Franz Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, and others.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 10E:
Intro to English I: Love and Death from Chaucer to Milton
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Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 10F:
Intro to English I: The Natural World in Early English Literary History
The first poem written down in English, composed in the 7th century, is about the creation of Earth; this course surveys British literature from then until the 17th century to explore the wisdom, beauty, mystery, and terror in medieval and early modern representations of nature. While following this tradition of writing about the natural world, we will study its connection to the evolution of English literary forms and the interplay between text and culture in this period. Old English riddles that enigmatize earth and sky; beast fables drawing human morality from animal behavior; the varieties of play between love and nature in sonnets; Elizabethan drama's power to conjure wildernesses onstage.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 10Q:
Technologies of Handwriting: History, Theory, Practice (DLCL 122Q)
Handwriting has a long history and significance. Think about Toni Morrison's diaries; a note by Einstein; a Laozi manuscript from the second century; Elizabeth I's poems; hieroglyphic laws; an electronic signature; a postcard from a friend. This course will investigate the history of handwriting, focusing on the importance of the technology and its digital aspects. We shall consider the training and physical efforts of scribes, and the transmission of knowledge, including that of traditionally oral cultures. We'll look at the development of western scripts, gain insight about materials and tools (from animal skin to reed pens) and learn calligraphy from an expert modern scribe, the better to understand the skill and aesthetic of this most everyday of technologies that, I shall argue, will outlive all others
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 11A:
Introduction to English II: From Milton to the Romantics
English majors must take class for 5 units. Major moments in English literary history, from John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' to John Keats's 'Hyperion'. The trajectory involves a variety of literary forms, including Augustan satire, the illuminated poetry of William Blake's handcrafted books, the historical novel invented by Sir Walter Scott, the society novel of Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth's epic of psychological and artistic development. Literary texts will be studied in the context of important cultural influences, among them civil war, religious dissent, revolution, commercialization, colonialism, and industrialization.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 11B:
Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (AMSTUD 150)
In this course we'll explore the uncanny world--at once strange and strangely familiar - of early American literature and culture, as we read diverse works - including poetry, captivity and slave narratives, seduction novels, Native American oratory, short stories, essays, autobiographies, and more - in relation to political, social, and artistic as well as literary contexts from the colonial period to the eve of Civil War. Note: students majoring (or planning to major) in English or American Studies should take the course for 5 units and for a letter grade.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 11Q:
Art in the Metropolis (ARTSINST 11Q, ARTSTUDI 11Q, FILMEDIA 11Q, MUSIC 11Q, TAPS 11Q)
This seminar is offered in conjunction with the annual "Arts Immersion" trip to New York that takes place over the spring break and is organized by the Stanford Arts Institute (SAI). Enrollment in this course is a requirement for taking part in the spring break trip. The program is designed to provide a group of students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the cultural life of New York City guided by faculty and SAI staff. Students will experience a broad range and variety of art forms (visual arts, theater, opera, dance, etc.) and will meet with prominent arts administrators and practitioners, some of whom are Stanford alumni. In the seminar, we will prepare for the diverse experiences the trip affords and develop individual projects related to particular works of art, exhibitions, and performances that we'll encounter in person during the stay in New York. Class time will be divided between readings, presentations, and one studio based creative project. The urban setting in which the various forms of art are created, presented, and received will form a special point of focus. A principal aim of the seminar will be to develop aesthetic sensibilities through writing critically about the art that interests and engages us and making art. For further details please visit the Stanford Arts Institute website: https://arts.stanford.edu/for-students/academics/arts-immersion/new-york/
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 12C:
Introduction to English III: Modern Literature
Survey of the major trends in literary history from 1850 to the present.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 12D:
Intro to English III: Latinx Literature (CHILATST 12D, COMPLIT 165, FEMGEN 12D)
Emerging from the demographic, political, and cultural shifts of the late twentieth century, LatinX Literature flourishes in the twenty-first century as a hemispherically American corpus of texts. Like both ChicanX and Puerto Rican literatures before it, LatinX Literature emerges from various movements for social justice to challenge both the Anglo and the Hispanic established literary traditions of the Americas. As a transnational, pluralistic, heterogeneous, and dynamic category that considers the writings of diverse peoples with cultural ties to Latin America residing in the U.S., it complicates and transgresses the linguistic, geopolitical and cultural borders of the Americas, including those of the Afro-Caribbean, Luso-Brazilian, and the Native First Nations. Aligning itself with the issues, styles, and topics of the Global South, LatinX Literature is a product of the kind of 'border thinking' that critic Walter Mignolo has described as a 'pluriversal epistemology that interconnects the plurality and diversity of decolonial projects.' Acknowledging its emergence from literal and theoretical border spaces and decolonizing epistemologies, the 'X' of LatinX intentionally inflects the link to an origin in LGBTQI discourses signifying 'a more inclusive, non-gender-binary designation for LatinX peoples' and as a border literature that articulates heterogeneous ways of making meaning. Authors may include Jesus Colón, Sandra Cisneros, Helena Maria Viramontes, Christina Garcia, Junot Diaz, Ire´ne Lara Silva, Julia Alvarez, Américo Paredes, Daniel Alarcón, Francisco Goldman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Tato Laviera, Ernesto Quinonez, Erika Sanchez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Luis Valdez, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Fernando Flores, or Oscar Cásares. NOTE: English majors must take this class for 5 units.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 12Q:
The Taboo
In this seminar, we will explore and theorize 'the taboo' and the consequences for transgressing taboos. On our quest, we will read broadly--from William Shakespeare's drama Othello to Christina Rossetti's poem 'Goblin Market' to Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime--to see how taboos around issues such as race, gender, and sexuality change and carry across different cultural, historical, geographical, and familial contexts. This class fulfills the WRITE 2 requirement.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, Writing 2
ENGLISH 13P:
Media and Communication from the Middle Ages to the Printing Press (ENGLISH 113P, HISTORY 13P, HISTORY 113P, MUSIC 13P, MUSIC 113P)
Did you know that the emperor Charlemagne was illiterate, yet his scribes revolutionized writing in the West? This course follows decisive moments in the history of media and communication, asking how new recording technologies reshaped a society in which most people did not read or write--what has been described as the shift "from memory to written record." To understand this transformation, we examine forms of oral literature and music, from the Viking sagas, the call to crusade, and medieval curses (Benedictine maledictions), to early popular authors such as Dante and the 15th-century feminist scribe, Christine de Pizan. We trace the impact of musical notation, manuscript and book production, and Gutenberg's print revolution. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, how did the medium shape the message? Along the way, we will consider how the medieval arts of memory and divine reading (lectio divina) can inform communication in the digital world. This is a hands-on course: students will handle medieval manuscripts and early printed books in Special Collections, and will participate in an "ink-making workshop," following medieval recipes for ink and for cutting quills, then using them to write on parchment. The course is open to all interested students.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 13Q:
Imaginative Realms
This class looks at the tradition of the imagined universe in fiction and poetry. Special topics include magical realism, artificial intelligence, and dystopias. Primary focus on giving students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. For undergrads only.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 15N:
Wastelands
Have human beings ruined the world? Was it war, or industry, or consumerism, or something else that did it? Beginning with an in-depth exploration of some of the key works of literary modernism, this class will trace the image of the devastated landscape as it develops over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, arriving finally at literary representations of the contemporary zombie apocalypse. Authors to include T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, and others.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 15Q:
Family Trees: The Intergenerational Novel
The vast majority of novels feature a central protagonist, or a cast of characters whose interactions play out over weeks or months. But some stories overflow our life spans, and cannot be truthfully told without the novelist reaching far back in time. In this Sophomore Seminar, we will consider three novels that seek to tell larger, more ambitious stories that span decades and continents. In the process, we will discuss how novelists build believable worlds, craft memorable characters, keep us engaged as readers, and manage such ambitious projects.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 16Q:
Family Stories
This creative writing workshop will explore the idea of family. We'll begin with our questions: How do we conceptualize the word family? How do family histories, stories, mythologies, and languages shape our narratives? What does family have to do with the construction of a self? How can we investigate the self and all of its many contexts in writing? We'll consider how we might work from our questions in order to craft work that is meaningful and revealing. Students will have the opportunity to write in both poetry and prose, as well as to develop their own creative cross-genre projects. Along the way, we'll discuss elements of craft essential to strong writing: how to turn the self into a speaker; how create the world of a piece through image, detail, and metaphor; how to craft beautiful sentences and lines; how to find a form; and many other topics.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 17N:
Animal Poems
Animals have always appealed to the human imagination. This course provides basic a rubric for analyzing a variety of animal poems in order (1) to make you better readers of poetry and (2) to examine some of the most pressing philosophical questions that have been raised in the growing field of animal studies. The animals that concern us here are not allegorical-the serpent as evil, the fox as cunning, the dove as a figure for love. Rather, they are creatures that, in their stubborn animality, provoke the imagination of the poet.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 17Q:
After 2001: A 21st Century Science Fiction Odyssey
In 1968, Stanley Kurick's 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined the future in the then distant year of 2001. Now that year is more than 20 years in the rearview and his science fiction future is now our past (with fewer PanAm flights to the moon and a stunning dearth of murderous AI). What is science fiction in the 21st century? What does it do? Who writes it? And, importantly, who is it for? In this class we will explore the questions of topic, author, audience, and community through the lens of the Hugo winning short stories since 2001. Hugo Awards are chosen by the fans, so this will allow us to examine the ways in which fandom and popular culture have changed in the last two decades in ways that has made the genre broader and more inclusive of writers and readers of every gender, race, and sexuality, while at the same time provoking a reactionary response in a minority of writers and fans who consider themselves decentered by these developments. Readings will include the Hugo winning short stories, some classic science fiction stories, and contemporary reports about the annual science fiction convention where these awards are given (WorldCon), and articles about science fiction fan culture. We will also view some of the science fiction visual works that have been important or influential in the past two decades. Timing and health permitted we will attend a local science fiction convention. This course will be reading- and writing-intensive but will also offer opportunities for spirited discussion. We will be engaging with sensitive subjects such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Assignments include weekly short essays, discussion leadership, individual presentations, and a final research paper.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 17SC:
London through Time, Text, and Technology
We have a textual history of London that dates from at least the 1st century BCE, and archaeological evidence of settlement that is even older. For millennia, the city of London has been both a place of textual production and itself the focus of authors' writings. The metropolis has been at the forefront of innovation in the human record (the first printing press in Britain was established in London; the first acoustic telephone, the first computer program, and the first wind-up radio were invented there); it is a space where new languages, new technologies of information, and new stories of the human experience have evolved. This course explores the genesis and long history of the city of London through text, image, and sound. We'll investigate inscribed wooden tablets that predate the Roman invasion of Britain; the manuscripts, printed texts, and performances of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; the emergence of musical innovators, like the Beatles and David Bowie; and the awareness of the city's history in contemporary authors' works, like Zadie Smith's The Wife of Willesden. Through these and other primary sources, students will explore the great city of London and its contribution to global text technologies, designing their own text technological study. We'll focus on literary and historical archives, art, sound and image recordings, and the idea of the `city as author', and, circumstances permitting, we'll visit the Huntington Library in Pasadena, as well as working in Stanford University Libraries and the Hoover Archives.
Last offered: Summer 2022
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 18N:
Shakespeare in Love
Fluid, ever changing, fresh and quick, love is the stuff of imagination. Who can define it? This course will begin where Shakespeare begins his career as a playwright with The Comedy of Errors. We then intersperse the reading of Shakespeare's sonnets (nos. 1-154) three comedies in which love figures as a principal theme: Love's Labor's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, and All's Well That Ends Well. The final three weeks will be devoted to different kinds of love as they appear in the Henry sequence. Against the stately backdrop of history, we will examine the betrayed love of Sir John Falstaff for Prince Hal, the lighthearted banter of the knight and Mistress Quickly, Henry V's wooing of Catherine of Valois.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 18Q:
Writer's Salon
This course explores from a writer's perspective what it takes to craft a successful novel, short story collection, or book of poetry. You will read three prize-winning books from Bay Area authors, including Creative Writing instructors here at Stanford. Each author will visit our class to talk about their work and the writing process. From week to week, you will complete short writing exercises culminating in a longer story or series of poems that you share with class. For undergrads only.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 19Q:
I Bet You Think You're Funny: Humor Writing Workshop
Nothing is harder than being funny on purpose. We often associate humor with lightness, and sometimes that's appropriate, but humor is inextricably interlinked with pain and anger, and our funniest moments often spring from our deepest wounds. Humor can also allow us a platform for rage and indignation when other forms of rhetoric feel inadequate. This workshop will take students through the techniques and aesthetics of humor writing, in a variety of forms, and the main product of the quarter will be to submit for workshop a sustained piece of humor writing. For undergrads only.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 20N:
Poetry: Wordsworth, Dickinson, Rilke
We will consider both the very short poems of these three master poets -- asking what precisely is the virtue and effect of these shortest linguistic art objects -- as well as their very long works or sequences, to think about scale and singularity or repetition in poetic utterance.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 21N:
Ecologies of Communication (DLCL 21N, SUSTAIN 51N)
What remnants of our culture will future generations discover and decipher and how will they interpret these? How will they access the technologies we have created? How will they understand the environmental changes that current humans have caused? And how will their encounters with the past inform their own future? This IntroSem explores a humanistic perspective on sustainability, viewing the human record itself as a resource and exploring how it might be sustained in an ethical and meaningful way. Broadly, we ask what is the science behind sustaining the ecology of historic heritage?
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 21Q:
Write Like a Poet: From Tradition to Innovation
In this poetry workshop, we will spend the first half of the quarter reading and writing in traditional forms and the second half innovating from those forms. When discussing poetry, what do we mean when we talk about craft? What is prosody and why is it important? What are the relationships between form and content? What does a modern sonnet look like? We will consider how a writer might honor a tradition without being confined by it. The culmination of the course will be a project in which the student invents (and writes in) a form of their own. All interested students are welcome beginners and experts alike.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 22Q:
Writing Mystical, Spiritual, and Altered Experiences
Because mystical, spiritual, and altered states of experience have always been a part of human life, we've always been trying to write about them. While some try to claim these subjects are frivolous, dated, or even dangerous, writers keep coming back to them, including some of the best writers of our time. Lucky for us, the results have been exhilarating. In this class, we'll look at a range of writers and forms to understand how these ancient subjects are handled in the contemporary context, including works by journalists Michael Pollan and Jia Tolentino, Scientists Robin Wall Kimmerer and Oliver Sacks, fiction writers Denis Johnson and Hillary Mantel, and poets Max Ritvo and Christopher Wiman. Most importantly, we'll write our own pieces of questioning, exploration, and awe.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 23Q:
First Chapters: Please Allow Me to Introduce My Novel
In this course we'll explore how an effective first chapter immerses us in the voice of the narrator, introduces a series of themes and problems, indicates character desires and fears, and most importantly enchants and inspires its readers. We'll write short reaction papers and hold discussions in small and large groups. In the second half of the quarter, students will compose their own first novel chapter of around 8-12 pages, and we'll workshop them in class. The final goal is to have a revised first chapter, a short outline for the rest of a book, and an increased knowledge of writing original and irresistible opening chapters.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 24N:
New Technologies of Literature
Technology changes how and what we read. In this course we will study how digital technology has changed literature: the ways in which it is written, to how it is distributed, and what we can do with it. Our readings will include literature produced collaboratively within fan fiction communities, literature written and distributed in social media posts, interactive fiction that borrows from innovations in games, and fiction 'written' by AI language models.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 24Q:
Leaving Patriarchy: A Course for All Genders (FEMGEN 24Q)
This is a creative writing course for writers of all genders who are interested in thinking about patriarchy and how to resist it. Our course will aim to complicate the idea that men benefit from patriarchy and are its primary enforcers, while the rest of us are simply suffering under it. We'll ask ourselves how patriarchy is bad for ALL of us, and how ALL of us are implicated in its perpetuation. Do we ALL have the reasons and the resources to leave patriarchy--and can we start to leave it right now? We'll read works of scholarship and literature that investigate patriarchy as a human relational problem. We'll write fiction and nonfiction in which we explore the ways patriarchy has shaped us, challenge ourselves to resist its manifestations in our relationships, envision a future without patriarchy, and begin to live that future right now. Most crucially, we will practice creating a space in which all of us can speak without fear of judgment about our experiences of a fraught topic.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 25Q:
Queer Stories (FEMGEN 25Q)
Queer Stories is a creative writing 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 write critical and creative work that engages with the styles, modes, and subjects of these writers. As we read and discuss texts, students will consider a variety of questions: How has queer romance, relationships, and sexuality been represented over the years, in both coded and explicit ways? How have writers grappled with representing our evolving sense of gender as a continuum rather than a binary? How have queer writers interrogated or understood the concept of family? How do queer writers handle the question of the "universal" reader to whom, arguably, they might be speaking? (In a 2012 interview with Lambda Literary, book critic Daniel Mendelsohn argues,contentiously, "It is precisely the gay book's ability to be interesting to a straight reader that makes it a great book.") Lastly, students will also create writing of their own that in some way draws upon the aesthetics or sensibilities of the authors we have read. These pieces may be short stories, personal essays, or texts that--in the spirit of queerness--blur or interrogate standard demarcations of genre. The content of this work might grapple with questions of gender and sexuality, but it might instead be queer in its affect, outlook, or style. In both the reading and writing they do in this class, students will engage with work that deviates from literary convention in the lives it represents and the ways in which it represents them.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 26Q:
The Brontes: a Victorian Family and its Marvelous Daughters
Isolated in the moorlands of Yorkshire and raised in evangelical strictness by an eccentric father, the Bronte children imagined stories of personal power and political intrigue, based on the news they read. The eldest of the three sisters, Charlotte, grew up to become a major novelist of the Victorian age. Her younger sister, Emily, became a poet and a novelist of wild genius. The youngest sister, Anne, wrote two arresting novels before her early death. The lone brother, Branwell, squandered his talents -- and much of the family's money -- before his death at thirty-one. In 1847, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Withering Heights, and Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey surprised literary London, and voiced an angry, sensual, urgent response to the Victorians' nagging "Woman Question." These eccentric novels register the tedium, the aspirations, and the frustrations of these gifted women. We will consider historical, cultural, and biographical questions, as we study these early novels, the children's juvenilia, and a representative later work. Each student will have the chance to investigate one of these women more deeply, and share their discoveries with the the seminar.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 27Q:
The Childhood Novel
In this course, we will consider the first volumes of three ambitious literary projects: Marcel Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME; Elena Ferrante's NEOPOLITAN NOVELS; and Karl Ove Knausgaard MY STRUGGLE. These writers, and the novels they wrote, may seem, at first glance, to be very different. Proust was a gay French writer, born in 1871. Ferrante is a reclusive Italian novelist whose identity has, for many years, been a mystery (including her year of birth). Knausgaard is a kind of literary rock star, a Norwegian novelist of immense fame. But all three novelists share a fascination with childhood, and all three novelists have produced works that walk a very fine line between fiction and memoir, imagination and memory. In reading the first volumes of these three long novel sequences, we'll consider what aspects of the writer's life are fit for the page. At what point does the novelist's allegiance to the recollection of their own particular past give way to their invention of a fictional world we can only dwell in? What is the difference between Proust, Ferrante and Knausgaard's first-person narrators and Proust, Ferrante and Knausgaard themselves? And what lessons might we draw from these novelists and novels when it comes to writing about our own childhood experiences?
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 28Q:
The Campus Novel
The college campus is a fascinating place, where people from different backgrounds come together for different purposes. So it is no wonder that many novelists have turned their attention upon the college campus as a setting for their novels. In this Sophomore Seminar, we will read three fantastic campus novels, and use these books as means of exploring big questions about the purpose of an undergraduate education.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 39Q:
Were They Really "Hard Times"? Mid-Victorian Social Movements and Charles Dickens (HISTORY 39Q)
"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it." So begins Charles Dickens description of Coketown in Hard Times. And it only seems to get more grim from there. But the world that Dickens sought to portray in the novel was a hopeful one, too. And that tension is our starting point. The intent of this class is to more closely examine mid-Victorian Britain in light of Dickens' novel, with particular focus on the rise of some of our modern social movements in the 19th century. While things like the labor movement, abolitionism, feminism, and environmentalism, are not the same now as they were then, this class will explore the argument that the 21st century is still, in some ways, working out 19th century problems and questions. At the same time, this is also a course that seeks to expand the kinds of sources we traditionally use as historians. Thus, while recognizing that literary sources are particularly complex, we will use Hard Times as a guide to our exploration to this fascinating era. We will seek both to better understand this complex, transitional time and to assess the accuracy of Dickens' depictions of socio-political life.Through a combination of short response papers, creative Victorian projects (such as sending a hand-written letter to a classmate), and a final paper/project, this course will give you the opportunity to learn more about the 19th century and the value of being historically minded.As a seminar based course, discussion amongst members of the class is vital. All students are welcome
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 46N:
American Moderns: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, & Fitzgerald (AMSTUD 46N)
While Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. We will read four short novels - Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - to address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished."
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 50:
Humanities House Workshop
For student-run workshops and research seminars in Ng House / Humanities House. Open to both residents and non-residents. May be repeated for credit. This course code covers several discrete workshops each quarter; sign up for a particular workshop via the Google Form at https://goo.gl/forms/TRU0AogJP3IHyUmr2.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
(up to 99 units total)
ENGLISH 50A:
Character Development: Writing a Script, Creating Engaging Characters
Seminar with Writer in Residence John Markus (BA English '78); meets for seven sessions over three weeks in February. Students will work one on one and in small groups with this professional writer and Stanford alum. John has written everything from stand-up to critically-acclaimed network and cable television shows to independent films to, most recently, theatrical plays. This seminar is designed for students who would like to produce a piece of work in three weeks and/or to pursue a writing profession.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 50B:
A Humanist's Guide to Art, Community, Design, and the Earth
This short, intensive seminar features Humanities Scholar & Artist in Residence Clare Whistler (visiting from England April 15-30) will meet for dialogue, workshop, creation, and improvisation. This workshop will help students to think through methods of humanistic inquiry as ways of integrating meaning and purpose into their lives; it will focus on projects, research, collaborations, walking explorations, and relationships. This course will be of interest to students who would like to maintain humanistic values, make a decent living, find good mentors and collaborators, and create communities that are attentive to their constructed and natural environments. This year's course will center on personal assignments and will focus in particular on the theme of gardens.The course will meet M/W 5-7 PM with optional Friday studio time. The first meeting is Monday, April 15.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 53Q:
Writing and Gender in the Age of Disruption (FEMGEN 53Q)
In this course, we will read a wide cross-section of British and American women writers who turned to fiction and poetry to examine, and to survive, their times: Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Una Marson. You will learn how to pay close attention to the often radically new ways these writers bent language to their purposes to express complex emotions and vexed political realities; in your own essay writing, you will learn how to write clearly and persuasively about small units of text and to craft longer critical analyses attentive to language, history, and culture. Always, students will be encouraged to draw connections between then and now, to ponder what has changed, and what remains to be changed, in our own turbulent times.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 54N:
Visible Bodies: Black Female Authors and the Politics of Publishing in Africa (AFRICAAM 140N, AFRICAST 51N, HISTORY 41N)
Where are the African female writers of the twentieth century and the present day? This Introductory Seminar addresses the critical problem of the marginalization of black female authors within established canons of modern African literature. We will explore, analyse and interrogate the reasons why, and the ways in which, women-authored bodies of work from this period continue to be lost, misplaced, forgotten, and ignored by a male-dominated and largely European/white publishing industry in the context of colonialism, apartheid and globalization. nnYou will be introduced to key twentieth-century and more contemporary female authors from Africa, some of them published but many more unpublished or out-of-print. The class will look at the challenges these female authors faced in publishing, including how they navigated a hostile publishing industry and a lack of funding and intellectual support for black writers, especially female writers. nnWe will also examine the strategies these writers used to mitigate their apparent marginality, including looking at how women self-published, how they used newspapers as publication venues, how they have increasingly turned to digital platforms, and how many sought international publishing networks outside of the African continent. As one of the primary assessments for the seminar, you will be asked to conceptualize and design an in-depth and imaginative pitch for a new publishing platform that specializes in African female authors. nnYou will also have the opportunity for in-depth engagement (both in class and in one-on-one mentor sessions) with a range of leading pioneers in the field of publishing and literature in Africa. Figures like Ainehi Edoro (founder of Brittle Paper) and Zukiswa Wanner (prize-winning author of The Madams and Men of the South), amongst others, will be guests to our Zoom classroom. One of our industry specialists will meet with you to offer detailed feedback on your proposal for your imagined publishing platform. nnYou can expect a roughly 50/50 division between synchronous and asynchronous learning, as well as plenty of opportunity to collaborate with peers in smaller settings.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 61N:
Jane Austen's Fiction
Austen's finely wrought novels were unlike any previous fiction, offering an intensely realized example of literary originality. This class focuses on Austen's major writing, all published in a remarkable ten year period. These novels - including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion - have had a profound impact on the development and understanding of the novel as an art form. We'll take the measure of Austen's inventiveness and her subtle, engrossing experiments in narrative voice, fictional character, representation and literary form. Our two goals will be to closely engage each novel (looking at the major interpretative and aesthetic questions that are generated) and to track the rich dialogue that takes place between her different texts when they are read together.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 66:
'A Model Island': Britain in Historical and Cultural Perspective
What's `culture'? There is no such thing as `British culture' as a coherent singular phenomenon, but `culture' can be a useful lens to think about a place, its entanglement with the past and the rest of the world. In this class we can understand how the ideas and social relations that constitute the common-sense fiction of British culture and the very notions of `Britishness', `Englishness', etc. came about historically and are sustained in contemporary contexts. As well as learn how to use `culture' as a heuristic-critical tool to make sense of a particular place's entanglement in history, politics, and cultural production.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 67N:
The Ethical Gangster: How to be Moral, How to be Good--Mafia Style
Is there a difference between being moral and being good? Does it matter? Does knowing the difference matter at all to how a person should conduct him or herself in close relationships, in social groups, in professional life, in politics? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. This class will explore human moral psychology: the intuitions we have about right and wrong, fair and unfair, harm, justice, loyalty, authority, sanctity, freedom and oppression. We will then relate these intuitions to systematic ethical theories of right and wrong. We will do so by immersing ourselves in a somewhat surprising source¿the greatest hits of Mafia movies from Little Caesar to The Sopranos. We will also consider recent findings in experimental moral psychology.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER
ENGLISH 68N:
Mark Twain and American Culture (AMSTUD 68N)
Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and¿ tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society's (and our society's) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, and what it means to be "American"?
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 71:
Dangerous Ideas (ARTHIST 36, COMPLIT 36A, EALC 36, ETHICSOC 36X, FRENCH 36, HISTORY 3D, MUSIC 36H, PHIL 36, POLISCI 70, RELIGST 36X, SLAVIC 36, TAPS 36)
Ideas matter. Concepts such as progress, technology, and sex, have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like cultural relativism 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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 4 units total)
ENGLISH 72N:
Serial Storytelling
"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?
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 81:
Philosophy and Literature (CLASSICS 42, COMPLIT 181, FRENCH 181, GERMAN 181, ILAC 181, ITALIAN 181, PHIL 81, SLAVIC 181)
Can novels make us better people? Can movies challenge our assumptions? Can poems help us become who we are? We'll think about these and other questions with the help of writers like Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust, Jordan Peele, Charlie Kaufman, Rachel Cusk, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Beckett, plus thinkers like Nehamas, Nietzsche, Nussbaum, Plato, and Sartre. We'll also ask whether a disenchanted world can be re-enchanted; when, if ever, the truth stops being the most important thing; why we sometimes choose to read sad stories; whether we ever love someone for who they are; who could possibly want to live their same life over and over again; what it takes to make ourselves fully moral; whether it's ever good to be conflicted; how we can pull ourselves together; and how we can take ourselves apart. (This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.)
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 83N:
City, Space, Literature (URBANST 83N)
This course presents a literary tour of various cities as a way of thinking about space, representation, and the urban. Using literature and film, the course will explore these from a variety of perspectives. The focus will be thematic rather than chronological, but an attempt will also be made to trace the different ways in which cities have been represented from the late nineteenth century to recent times. Ideas of space, cosmopolitanism, and the urban will be explored through films such as The Bourne Identity and The Lunchbox, as well as in the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter Mosley, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid, among others.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 90:
Fiction Writing
The elements of fiction writing: narration, description, and dialogue. Students write complete stories and participate in story workshops. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter). NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors: ;
Beaty, G. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
HolyWhiteMountain, S. (PI);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Tomar, R. (PI);
Trahan, J. (PI);
Williams, Z. (PI)
ENGLISH 90AX:
Creative Writing: The Magic of Baseball in Film & Fiction
In 1954, French-American historian and educator Jacques Barzun observed that "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." In this creative writing course, we'll examine the role of baseball (whether minuscule or major) in our lives and American culture and history at large by engaging with notable baseball films (The Natural, Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, and Moneyball), baseball literature, and critical essays. Why have scholars suggested "that baseball may be perceived as a sort of mirror in which values, power, politics, fashion, class, economics, and race be viewed in microcosm," as Ronald Briley writes in "Baseball and American Cultural Values"? How has baseball become intertwined with American identity? What is it about the sport that immediately evokes nostalgia on a national level? What do baseball legends have in common with canonical literary heroes? Through our process of discovery, we'll "pitch" baseball as an objective correlative and use it to power our own fiction. In this workshop designed for both rookie and pro writers, the goals and objectives are: to become acquainted with a brief overview of baseball's history and rules in the nineteenth century and beyond; to learn and experiment with the craft elements of fiction: character, POV, plot, and place; to improve upon incorporating research, analysis, and American popular culture into creative work; to deliver and receive collegial feedback about creative work within a supportive community; to hit a baseball (seriously!) and attend a San Francisco Giants game. Baseball, like creative writing, is an art form that takes practice, and every baseball player is part of a team. In the same way, no writer becomes great alone.
Last offered: Summer 2023
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 90DC:
DCI Sports Writing
Open to DCI Fellows and Partners only. In this seminar we will study and practice the many ways that creative writers frame, and even critique, an interest in athleticism, beauty, spectatorship, and achievement. We will look at and beyond the tropes and clichés of sports writing. Why do we write about sports? How do we write well about them? In what ways do our sports, competitions, and leisure activities reflect personal and collective beliefs about wellness, nature, the individual, and the society? To what end are those reflections cultivated and sustained? From regional fandom to the single adventurer, boxing and baseball to volleyball and table tennis, creative writers continue to mine a rich vein of 'sports writing'. 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. Throughout the quarter, we will read a wide range of creative writing about sports by popular writers, literary authors, athletes, and journalists. We will discuss essays, book excerpts, testimonials, stories, and pieces of journalism. You will write and bring to workshop short and long pieces, and receive peer and instructor feedback. A variety of creative prompts and critical exercises will foster your understanding and appreciation of literature, as well as your growth as a creative writer. Please note: this is a 3-credit seminar course. You should expect to do less work than in the 5-credit memoir workshop.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 90E:
Investigating Identity Through Filipinx Fiction (ASNAMST 90E, COMPLIT 89)
This course is both a reading seminar featuring canonical and contemporary Filipinx authors (including Mia Alvar, Carlos Bulosan, Elaine Castillo, Bienvenido Santos, Lysley Tenorio and José Rizal) and a writing workshop where students generate short stories exploring identity. Rizal's seminal novels Noli Me Tangere and El filibusterismo are ¿the earliest artistic expressions of the Asian colonial experience from the point of view of the oppressed¿ and through his work and the work of other Filipinx authors, we discover how both national and individual identities are not only challenged by adversity, trauma, violence, and war but also forged and strengthened by them. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 90FC:
First Chapters
Novels only get one chance to make a good first impression. Chapter One is that opportunity, and in this course we'll read, discuss, and analyze a variety of historical and contemporary novels with a particular focus on their opening chapter (and sometimes prologue). We'll study strategies around world-building, characterization, creating the engine of a novel (its voice), and in establishing a lively, complex, and surprising world that a reader can't wait to explore in greater detail.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90H:
Humor Writing Workshop
What makes writing funny? What are we doing when we try to be funny? In this creative writing workshop, you'll exercise your native wit by writing short pieces of humor in a variety of forms. We'll practice writing jokes, parody, satire, sketches, stories, and more, study theories of humor, research practical principles and structures that writers have repeatedly used to make things funny, and enjoy and analyze examples of humor old and new to use as models. In the service of creating and understanding humor, we'll also explore questions about what purposes humor serves, and what relationship humor has with power, culture, and history.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90L:
Latine Stories (CHILATST 90)
This is a course on the craft of fiction writing. We will read published literary short stories by contemporary Latine writers writing in the United States and begin to explore the vast range of fictional techniques employed by these writers. In discussing these published works, we will analyze how the formal elements of story - structure, plot, character, point of view, etc. - function in these pieces, so that students can apply these principles of craft to their own work. Students will write two complete short stories, which will be discussed in a traditional workshop format.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 90M:
Queer Stories (FEMGEN 90M)
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. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 90Q:
Sports Writing
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90QN:
Quantum Narratives:Writing Fiction about Science, Philosophy and Human Experience in the Quantum Age
Classical modes of storytelling have served writers and readers for centuries, but with mainstream recognition of the complexities and uncertainties that underpin reality, might there also exist less traditional, but perhaps truer, modes of storytelling? Shouldn't our narrative approaches be updated to incorporate quantum realities such as uncertainty, superposition and 'spooky action?' Can characters become entangled or exist in many worlds? What are the narrative implications of a black hole? This course hopes to examine the assertion by Cixin Liu, in his novel The Three-Body Problem, that 'Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind,' as it transcends culture, language and individual experience. Designed for writers and readers interested in exploring the narrative implications and possibilities of science, computing and AI, this workshop-focused course will combine readings, writing exercises and story crafting. Open to writers of all levels and backgrounds, the focus will be on research/science-based narrative rather than fantasy/folkloric writing. (i.e. wormholes, okay; elves and dragons, not so much.)
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 90R:
American Road Trip
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, including prose, poetry, films, and photography. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own stories, and considering the ways in which our personal journeys have come to inform and define our lives. The course includes a number of campus-wide field trips, and an end-of-quarter road trip down the California coast.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90V:
Fiction Writing
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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90W:
Writing and War
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.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 90WM:
Writing Mystical, Spiritual, and Altered States: A Workshop
In this writing workshop, we will explore core fiction and nonfiction techniques by engaging with the long literary tradition of writing about mystical, spiritual, and altered states of experience. The logic is simple: if you can write well about what is often called 'indescribable; or 'ineffable,' you can write about almost anything. We will look at how mystical experiences, spiritual searching, loss of faith, drug experiences, pilgrimages, the natural sublime, and even migraines have made for exhilarating subjects by some of our best contemporary writers, including Michael Pollan, Jia Tolentino, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Oliver Sacks, Denis Johnson, Hillary Mantel, Peter Matthiessen, and Annie Dillard. After close readings and discussions, students will write and workshop their own pieces of questioning, exploration, and awe. Students must attend the first class to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 91:
Creative Nonfiction
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. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter and for SLE students). NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors: ;
Beaty, G. (PI);
Brewer, W. (PI);
Ekiss, K. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Holbert, J. (PI);
HolyWhiteMountain, S. (PI);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
Nguyen, H. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Shewmaker, M. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Tomar, R. (PI);
Williams, Z. (PI)
ENGLISH 91A:
Asian American Autobiography/W (AMSTUD 91A, ASNAMST 91A, CSRE 91D)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 91AI:
Creative Writing & Science: The Artful Interpreter (OCEANS 157H, OCEANS 257H)
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 provides a unique opportunity for students to directly engage with marine animals, coastal habitats and environmental concerns of Monterey Bay. As historian Jill Lepore writes of Rachel Carson: "She could not have written Silent Spring if she hadn't, for decades, scrambled down rocks, rolled up her pant legs, and waded into tide pools, thinking about how one thing can change another..." Students will complete and workshop three original nonfiction essays that explore the intersection between personal narrative and scientific curiosity. You will develop a more patient and observant eye and improve your ability to articulate scientific concepts to a general readership. Students must submit a Google Form to request enrollment by December 1st: https://forms.gle/yoPriHjyE1GHrCJh7 If selected for enrollment, students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot. **Course taught in-person only at Hopkins Marine Station.** Please note: Depending on enrollment across the courses offered on Fridays at Hopkins, a university shuttle will be made available or carpool mileage reimbursements will be provided. Carpool reimbursement is subject to specific terms and conditions; class lists will be distributed for this purpose. However, if a university shuttle is provided, carpool reimbursements will not be honored.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 91DC:
Writing the Memoir
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 91DF:
Documentary Fictions
More and more of the best American fiction, plays, and even comics are being created out of documentary practices such as in-depth interviewing, oral histories, and reporting. Novels like Dave Eggers' What is the What, plays like Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, and narrative journalism like Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, all act as both witnesses and translators of people's direct experience and push art into social activism in new ways. In this course students will examine the research methods, artistic craft, and ethics of these rich, genre-bending works and then create documentary fictions of their own. Readings will include works by Truman Capote, Dave Eggers, and Lisa Taddeo, as well as Katherine Boo, author of the award-winning Behind the Beautiful Forevers, who will visit the class. No prior creative writing or journalism experience required. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 8 units total)
ENGLISH 91NW:
Nature Writing
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.NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 91V:
Creative Nonfiction
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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 91VO:
Voices of the Land
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.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 92:
Reading and Writing Poetry
Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. Prerequisite: PWR 1. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 92AP:
Arab and Arab-American Poetry (CSRE 92D)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 92BP:
Contemporary Black Poetry and Poetics (AFRICAAM 92BP)
In this poetry workshop, students will write and read closely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor and simile, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. The course reading will focus on the rich diversity of contemporary poetry from the global Black diaspora, with a special emphasis on poetry that investigates the intersections of race, cultural identity, nationhood, gender, and sexuality. Note: No prior knowledge of Black poetry and poetics is required.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 92L:
Poems of Love and Sexuality (FEMGEN 92L)
This writing-intensive workshop will explore the tradition of love poetry, paying attention to how poets have represented the amorous and the erotic in their work - powerful longing, steamy encounters, devastating break-ups - from ancient times to today. As we analyze and interpret the ways poems can record shifting attitudes toward sex, gender, queerness, and relationships, we will also focus on the creative process: generating a sequence of our own poems and developing practical writing skills in group poetry workshops.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 92V:
Reading and Writing Poetry
Online workshop course in which students explore issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 92VP:
Visual Arts and Poetry
This creative writing workshop will make use of Stanford's own Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection to explore the relationship between poetry and visual art. We'll read poets whose work incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, film, and ekphrasis, and will engage poetically with art on view at Stanford. Each student will produce a mixed media chapbook by the end of the quarter. Readings will include works by Claudia Rankine, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anne Carson, William Blake, Robin Coste Lewis, Maggie Nelson, Layli Long Soldier, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Etel Adnan. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 93Q:
The American Road Trip
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!
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 94Q:
The Future is Feminine (FEMGEN 94Q)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 102:
Pathogens and Populations: Representing Infectious Disease
Infectious diseases are too small to see and too large to fathom. Biologically, microscopic invaders, viruses even smaller than our cells, can travel across the planet and infect billions of humans. Socially, individual contacts have the potential to devastate families, fracture communities, and decimate whole civilizations. How can we comprehend, let alone make meaningful decisions about, complex multi-scale systems of people and pathogens?The main way we try to understand infectious diseases is putting them into other forms that straddle these scales, in short, representing them. To address the resulting representational problems, this course explores a range of scientific and cultural representations of disease. We will ask: What are the underlying assumptions and limits made in our attempts to describe a pathogen spreading through a population? How can board games, mathematical models, and oral histories show the randomness behind catastrophic outbreaks? Or, how might a network model illustrate the way HIV spreads among characters in a novel? How does the epidemiological case study rely on the same principles as tabloid stories about "superspreaders" like Typhoid Mary?The goal of the course is to understand and critique the ways infectious disease is represented, and especially to understand what and who is excluded in different modes of representation. This course is appropriate for students interested in public health, medicine, life writing, science writing, history of science, and media studies. In addition to scientific papers, course material will include plays, poems, board games, comics, novels, oral narratives, and newspaper articles.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 104C:
Medieval Violence
The Middle Ages have a reputation for extraordinary violence, but why? In this course, we study the medieval literary record for answers, exploring the artistic, historical, and social conditions compelling these authors to write about war, murder, and other brutalities. How did Viking economy and religion converge to make raiding and slavery moral enterprises? How did antisemitic theology dehumanize Jews, exposing their bodies to real and symbolic violence and outlawry? Why were the first several centuries of English written poetry modeled on preliterate barbarian war chant? To answer these questions and others, we will survey texts from medieval English, Norse, French, and German literary traditions; by the end of this course, students will understand medieval relationships between literature, violence, and the imagination, and how medieval literature and its cultural lineage construct modern ideas about the upper limits of human ferocity. Texts in English or English translation; no knowledge of medieval languages required.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 104D:
Stories from the Viking Age
In this course, students read the medieval myths, legends, folklore, travelers' tales, and chronicles that give shape and character to what we now call "the Viking Age" (793-1066 CE). Through our readings of these texts, we will answer the following questions: who were the Vikings? What language did they speak? Who were their gods and what were they like? What stories did they tell, how did these shape their values, and what were their principles of literary art? What did other cultures think of them, and who is responsible for their reputation? Readings?originally in Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Arabic, and more?will be in modern English translation.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 105A:
Aesthetics and the Audience: Literary Landmarks
In this course, we will consider major landmarks of aesthetic reflection on the meanings of artworks for their audiences, each of which is a landmark of literature in its own right. Authors might include the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Schiller, Hazlitt, Nietzsche, Woolf, Sontag, Cavell, Irigaray.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 106A:
Black Mirror: A.I.Activism (AMSTUD 106B, ARTHIST 168A, CSRE 106A, SYMSYS 168A)
Lecture/small group course exploring intersections of STEM, arts and humanities scholarship and practice that engages with, and generated by, exponential technologies. Our course explores the social ethical and artistic implications of artificial intelligence systems with an emphasis on aesthetics, civic society and racial justice, including scholarship on decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 110:
The Indian Novel
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.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 112C:
Humanities Core: Great Minds of the Italian Renaissance and their World (HUMCORE 122)
What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccol¿ Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English. On Tuesdays you meet in your own course, and on Thursday all the HumCore seminars in session that quarter meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 113A:
African American Ecologies (AFRICAAM 113A)
African American perspectives on the environment have long been suppressed in mainstream ecological discourse, despite the importance of questions of land, labor, and resource to the historical and ongoing experiences of Black people in the United States. Against this exclusion, this course takes up African American literature as a unique site of ecological knowledge and environmental thought. Drawing on texts, art, music, and film from the late nineteenth century to the present, this course considers planetary problems of ecological catastrophe and climatic change in relation to the everyday structures of U.S.-American racial politics. Through close analyses of texts and films set on plantations and steamships, in gardens and coal mines, students will explore the environmental dimensions of African American literature, and gain a deeper understanding of the real-world histories with which these works engage. Texts will include novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Percival Everett, and Toni Morrison, short stories and essays by Charles Chesnutt, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine McKittrick, and adrienne marie brown, and films and multimedia works by Julie Dash, Stephanie Dinkins, and Jordan Peele. Important topics will include the ecology of the plantation, black feminist ecological thought, and the significance of water in African American life and culture.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 113P:
Media and Communication from the Middle Ages to the Printing Press (ENGLISH 13P, HISTORY 13P, HISTORY 113P, MUSIC 13P, MUSIC 113P)
Did you know that the emperor Charlemagne was illiterate, yet his scribes revolutionized writing in the West? This course follows decisive moments in the history of media and communication, asking how new recording technologies reshaped a society in which most people did not read or write--what has been described as the shift "from memory to written record." To understand this transformation, we examine forms of oral literature and music, from the Viking sagas, the call to crusade, and medieval curses (Benedictine maledictions), to early popular authors such as Dante and the 15th-century feminist scribe, Christine de Pizan. We trace the impact of musical notation, manuscript and book production, and Gutenberg's print revolution. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, how did the medium shape the message? Along the way, we will consider how the medieval arts of memory and divine reading (lectio divina) can inform communication in the digital world. This is a hands-on course: students will handle medieval manuscripts and early printed books in Special Collections, and will participate in an "ink-making workshop," following medieval recipes for ink and for cutting quills, then using them to write on parchment. The course is open to all interested students.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 114B:
Paradise Lost
Intensive reading of Milton's epic Paradise Lost together with selections from Milton's other poetry and from his prose.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
ENGLISH 115:
Virtual Italy (ARCHLGY 117, CLASSICS 115, HISTORY 238C, ITALIAN 115)
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 computational 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 programming experience necessary.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 115E:
Shakespeare and his Contexts: Race, Religion, Sexuality, Gender
This course will explore contexts of race, religion, sexuality and gender in multiple Shakespeare plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest), with critical readings on topics including feminist and queer theory, transvestite theater, historically blackface performance, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, forced conversion, competing empires, colonialism and postcolonialism, and racial profiling (among others).
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 115H:
Essential Shakespeare, Shakespearean Essence
What do we mean when we call something Shakespearean? It is not uncommon to see the adjective tied to political scandals, prestige television (e.g. Succession), or inventive lyricists. But then again, for the Romantics, Shakespeare also represented the artist who disappeared behind his works?the chameleon poet whose characters become free artists unto themselves. In this course, we will read a selection of poems and plays to explore what, if anything, is Shakespearean about Shakespeare. Is there a tragic vision that is particularly Shakespearean? How has same-sex desire, ubiquitous in the poems and plays, been erased from the mainstream conception of the Shakespearean? Is there a particularly Shakespearean understanding of gender? Is there a Shakespearean politics? A Shakespearean philosophy? While we pursue this essence of Shakespeare, we will also be thinking about what it means for Shakespeare to have become an "essential" author in the canon of English literature. This course should appeal to Shakespearean devotees and skeptics alike, as well as neutral parties, since, as we might conclude, there is nothing more Shakespearean than ambivalence.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 118:
Literature and the Brain (COMPLIT 138, COMPLIT 238, ENGLISH 218, FRENCH 118, FRENCH 218, PSYC 126, PSYCH 118F)
How does fiction make us better at reading minds? Why do some TV shows get us to believe two contradictory things at once? And can cognitive biases be a writer's best friend? We'll think about these and other questions in the light of contemporary neuroscience and experimental psychology, with the help of Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), season 1 of Westworld (Lisa Joy / Jonathan Nolan), and short readings from writers like Louise Glück, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. We'll also ask what we see when we read; whether the language we speak affects the way we think; and why different people react differently to the same book. Plus: is free will a fiction, or were you just forced to say that?
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 119:
Pitching and Publishing in Popular Media (FEMGEN 118)
FOR UNDERGRADUATES ONLY (grad students enroll in 318 in the winter) 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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 3 units total)
ENGLISH 122C:
Medieval Fantasy Literature
This is a comparative medieval literature course that surveys Anglo-Norman and English romance, English and Norse heroic epic, and Norse and Celtic mythology. 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. Finally we will turn to some modern works inspired by these medieval texts, reflecting on how literary medievalism has cultivated the tropes of medieval fantasy to produce works which mediate between an imagined history, sublime fabrication, and contemporary concerns.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 124:
The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 125:
Virginia Woolf in the Age of #MeToo (FEMGEN 125V)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 131D:
Imagining Adaptive Societies (CSRE 161, CSRE 261, POLISCI 131, POLISCI 331D, SUSTAIN 131, SUSTAIN 231)
The ecological, social, and economic crises of the Anthropocene suggest it is time for us to re-imagine how best to organize our communities, our institutions, and our societies. Despite the clear shortcomings, our society remains stuck in a rut of inaction. During periods of rapid social and economic change, segments of society become gripped by a nostalgia for idealized pasts that never really existed; such nostalgia acts as a powerful force that holds back innovation and contributes to a failure of imagination. How, then, might we imagine alternative social arrangements that could allow us to thrive sustainably in an environment of greater equity? Moshin Hamid reminds us that literature allows us to break from violent nostalgia while imagining better worlds, while Ursula K. Le Guin notes that "imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there are other ways to do things, other ways to be; that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be." There are - there has to be - other and better ways to be. In this multi-disciplinary class, we turn to speculative fiction as a way of imagining future societies that are adaptable, sustainable, and just and can respond to the major challenges of our age. In addition to reading and discussing a range of novels and short stories, we bring to bear perspectives from climate science, social science, and literary criticism. We will also be hosting several of the authors to talk about their work and ideas.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 133B:
Storytelling and Mythmaking: Modern Odysseys
In 1923, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote an essay in praise of James Joyce's Ulysses' a novel that adapted episodes of Homer's Odyssey into the daily life of twentieth-century Dublin. "It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary, In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him, Instead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. "In this class, as both readers and writers, we will make use of this "mythical method" ourselves, as critical readers and creative writers. Using the same ancient material as a foundation, we'll follow a host of modern writers and critics who have been inspired by Homer to create new stories and to theorize narrative itself. These writers include Joyce, Franz Kafka, Derek Walcott, Junot D¿az, Margaret Atwood, Louise Gl¿ck, and Daniel Mendelsohn.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 138E:
The Gothic in Literature and Culture (COMPLIT 118, ENGLISH 238E)
This course introduces students to the major features of Gothic narrative, a form that emerges at the same time as the Enlightenment, and that retains its power into our present. Surveying Gothic novels, as well as novellas and short stories with Gothic elements, we will learn about the defining features of the form and investigate its meaning in the cultural imagination. Gothic narratives, the course will suggest, examine the power of irrational forces in a secular age: forces that range from barbaric human practices, to supernatural activity, to the re-enchantment of modern existence. We will also consider the importance for Gothic authors and readers of the relation among narrative. spectacle and the visual arts. Primary works may include Ann Radcliffe's <e>The Italian, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey</e>, Victor Hugo's <e>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</e>, E.T.A. Hoffman's <e>The Sandman</e>, Mary Shelly's <e>Frankenstein</e>, and Edgar Allen Poe's <e>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym</e>. We may also do a section on vampires, including Bram Stoker's <e>Dracula</e>, and its remake in film by F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog. Critical selections by Edmund Burke, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Terry Castle, among others.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 139C:
American Literature and Social Justice (AMSTUD 139C, FEMGEN 139C)
How have American writers tried to expose and illuminate racism and sexism through fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and poetry? How have they tried to focus our attention on discrimination and prejudice based on race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion and national origin? What writing strategies can break through apathy and ignorance? What role, if any, can humor play in this process?
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 140C:
Sex and Violence in Jacobean Tragedy
Jacobean tragedy refers to the high-water mark of English tragedy achieved during the reign of James I. Think Othello and Macbeth. During these years (1603-25) Shakespeare and his talented contemporaries unflinchingly examined the role played by lust, violence, political intrigue, revenge ('a wild kind of justice'), and the certitude of death in constituting the meaning of human existence. We will read classic examples of this 'theater of cruelty' by Shakespeare and his rivals and collaborators Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 140D:
Environmental Humanities: Finding Our Place on a Changing Planet (BIO 184, SUSTAIN 140)
The rapid degradation of our planet threatens the health and survival of communities and ecosystems around the world. How did we get here? What cultural, philosophical, and ethical challenges underlie the separation of humanity from nature and precipitate unprecedented ecological destruction? How can we make sense of this, and how can we reimagine a more connected future? Through engaging the work of environmental philosophers, cultural ecologists, artists, humanities scholars, Indigenous leaders, and others with land-based knowledge, this course will prompt you to think deeply about humanity's place in the world and explore strategies to change our course. Together, we will explore contrasting cultural paradigms around human-nature relationships and apply learnings to action - including through final projects that involve external audiences in meaningful environmental contemplation or impact.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
ENGLISH 144B:
Contemporary British Fiction: History, Language, Place
How do contemporary British novelists represent dramatic changes in culture, class, demography, generation, economy, gender, race, and national identity following the allied victory in the Second World War (1939-1945)?¿ Focusing on writers born between 1948 and 1975, we examine the structuring of historical consciousness in novels by Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and Hilary Mantel.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 145I:
Curating 20th Century U.S. Literature
Throughout the 20th century, writers in the United States of America produced an unprecedentedly large, diverse, and transformative body of literature. Authors, editors, and publishers began anthologizing this material early in the century, often aiming to introduce new communities of writers¿including those marginalized because of their race, gender, or sexuality¿to U.S. readers. As a result, anthologies became important to the lives and literature of a wide range of major 20th century U.S. authors, including EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE, HILDA "H.D." DOOLITTLE., WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, LANGSTON HUGHES, ZORA NEAL HURSTON, RICHARD WRIGHT, ALLEN GINSBERG, ADRIENNE RICH, AMIRI BARAKA, FRANK O'HARA, JACK KEROUAC, AUDRE LORDE, CARLOS BULOSAN, FRANK CHIN, GLORIA ANZALDÚA, BERNADETTE MAYER, LESLIE MARMON SILKO, LOUISE ERDRICH, MICHAEL CHABON, CLAUDIA RANKINE AND MANY, MANY MORE., Students in this course will have the opportunity to read all of these authors and others, and in doing so will construct a concrete, comprehensive, and cutting-edge understanding of how U.S. literature developed over the course of the 20th century.
Last offered: Summer 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 146F:
Fiction Intensive: Crafting a Short Story Collection
In this seminar, we will take a deep dive into the creation of short stories. You will come away from the course with an expansive sense of what goes into crafting a short story collection, from its earliest ideas to a fully realized book. Reading some of the most exciting contemporary fiction -- including work by Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, Carmen Maria Machado and Joy Williams -- we will examine each story as a model for inspiration and imitation. Through weekly writing prompts and in-depth discussions, we will explore and practice how writers build nuanced and multi-dimensional characters, sharp and believable dialogue, sustained suspense and other techniques essential to writing powerful short fiction. We will read a variety of short story collections, with each week centered around a specific topic, including World Building and Ghost Stories. Some weeks the author will visit the class, giving us the unique chance to analyze their work with them, and to learn about the craft and life of a working fiction writer. Fulfills short story literature requirement for the Minor in Creative Writing and the Creative Writing Emphasis in the English Major.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 146W:
Iconic Short Stories
Exploration of classic (mostly) and contemporary short stories emphasizing craft aspects useful to writers and looking closely at how Chekhov, Kafka, Woolf, Flaubert, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Munro, and others evoke emotion. Fulfills short story literature requirement for the Minor in Creative Writing and the Creative Writing Emphasis in the English Major. Admission by consent of instructor.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 150J:
Queer Poetry and Poetics (FEMGEN 150J)
This course offers an investigation into queer poetry and poetics within a contemporary and historical framework. Undergirded by recent works from LGBTQIA poets alongside foundational scholarship, it will explore what queerness as an identity, politic, and theoretical framework might teach us about poetry and what the formal, voice-driven, and experimental elements of poetry might teach us about queerness. Works may include offerings from Eve Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, Audre Lorde and new books of poems by Franny Choi, Charif Shanihan, Paul Tran as well as others. Students are invited to respond to the provocations of this class in a variety of ways including both creatively and critically.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 150K:
Animal Poems
Animals have always appealed to the human imagination. This course provides basic a rubric for analyzing a variety of animal poems in order (1) to make you better readers of poetry and (2) to examine some of the most pressing philosophical questions that have been raised in the growing field of animal studies. The animals that concern us here are not allegorical - the serpent as evil, the fox as cunning, the dove as a figure for love. Rather, they are creatures that, in their stubborn animality, provoke the imagination of the poet.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 150L:
Poetry of Migration
What does it mean to be "a nation of immigrants," a "melting pot" of cultures, peoples, and histories from elsewhere? Who are the "huddled masses yearning to be free" that the words on the Statue of Liberty ("Mother of Exiles") claim to welcome? How have different immigrant communities conceptualized the American Dream? With a view to the notion of the artist as an outsider, as a figure who draws his or her authority not from proximity to but, paradoxically, remoteness from centers of power, we will explore these questions through a survey of modern and contemporary poetry in the United States, from Robert Hayden and Agha Shahid Ali to Solmaz Sharif and Monica Youn. We will tackle issues of assimilation and alienation, naturalization and foreignness, linguistic code-switching and exophony. We will study how migrant poets have adapted one of the most ancient narrative tropes - that of the nostos or homecoming - to represent the discovery, founding, or rejection of a home away from home. And we will learn about how these poets have drawn upon their increasingly marginalized art-form's association with outsiderhood to establish their own poetic authority.
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 152E:
Black Mirror: Representations of Race & Gender in AI (AFRICAAM 261E, ENGLISH 261E)
tba
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 152G:
Harlem Renaissance (AFRICAAM 152G, AMSTUD 152G)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 152K:
Mixed-Race Politics and Culture (AFRICAAM 226, AMSTUD 152K, CSRE 152K)
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. If you have any questions about enrollment or need a permission number, please contact Farrah Moreno (farrahm@stanford.edu).
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 153G:
Literature and the Future
We often think of literature as a window onto the past. This class, by contrast, will offer various ways of analyzing the relationship between writing and the future. Writing might represent forecasts of the future, as in some speculative fiction; it can attempt to speak to the readers of the future; it can use apocalyptic visions to make people in the present feel ethical responsibility to the future (as in some literature on climate change). Writing of the past can also hail us today as its own future. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, David Mitchell, William Shakespeare, and more. Themes will include Afrofuturism, ecological futurity, revolutionary futures, literary reception, the future represented by your desire to finish a text, and more.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 154D:
American Disaster (AMSTUD 154D, SOC 154A)
How do we make sense of catastrophe? Who gets to write or make art about floods, fires, or environmental collapse? How do disaster and its depiction make visible or exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities? Beginning with the Jamestown colony and continuing to the present, this course explores the long history of disaster on the North American continent, and how it has been described by witnesses, writers, and artists. From the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic to Hurricane Katrina, the Dust Bowl to contemporary explorations of climate change, this seminar will put in conversation a wide range of primary and secondary materials. Possible texts include writings by Mike Davis, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca Solnit, Jesmyn Ward, and Richard Wright; films Wildlife (2018), First Reformed (2017), When the Levees Broke (2006), and Free Willy II (1995); and art by Dorothea Lange, Winslow Homer, and Richard Misrach. For the final paper, students will write a critical essay on a disaster novel, film, or other work or object of their choice, or develop their own creative piece or oral history.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 154F:
Film & Philosophy (FRENCH 154, ITALIAN 154, PHIL 193C)
What makes you the individual you are? Should you plan your life, or make it up as you go along? Is it always good to remember your past? Is it always good to know the truth? When does a machine become a person? What do we owe to other people? Is there always a right way to act? How can we live in a highly imperfect world? And what can film do that other media can't? We'll think about all of these great questions with the help of films that are philosophically stimulating, stylistically intriguing, and, for the most part, gripping to watch: Do The Right Thing (Lee), The Dark Knight (Nolan), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kaufman), Arrival (Villeneuve), My Dinner with Andr¿ (Malle), Blade Runner (Scott), La Jet¿e (Marker), Fight Club (Fincher), No Country for Old Men (Coen), The Seventh Seal (Bergman), and Memento (Nolan). Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory; and fun. We will not be using the waitlist on Axess - if you would like to enroll and the course is full/closed please email us to get on the waitlist!
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 155:
Stories at the Border (COMPLIT 156, GLOBAL 120)
How authors and filmmakers represent the process of border-making as a social experience? How do the genres in which they work shape our understandings of the issues themselves? We will explore several different genres of visual and textual representation from around the world that bear witness to border conflict - including writing by China Miéville, Carmen Boullosa, Joe Sacco, and Agha Shahid Ali - many of which also trouble the borders according to which genres are typically separated and defined.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 157D:
Literature of the Anthropocene
We are living in a time of expedient environmental change caused by human influence. How has the American literary imagination metabolized the science and psychology of the moment? How do recently published works of poetry and fiction reflect our evolving relationship to animals, natural resources, weather and the very concept of 'nature' itself? How can stories and poems as cultural products help raise or sustain an ecological awareness, individually and collectively? Can a story introduce research or present a future that might otherwise seem inaccessible? Can a poem advance our understanding of the link between social justice and climate justice? These are some of the questions we'll ask as we engage texts by aesthetically, experientially, and culturally diverse writers. This small, discussion-based seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary exchange - students from across campus disciplines are encouraged to enroll.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 158H:
Science Meets Literature on the Monterey Peninsula (OCEANS 158H, OCEANS 258H)
(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. Formally BIOHOPK 158H & 258H.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 159:
James Baldwin & Twentieth Century Literature (AFRICAAM 159, AMSTUD 159, FEMGEN 159)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 160:
Poetry and Poetics
Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse.English majors must take this class for 5 units.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 161:
Narrative and Narrative Theory (COMPLIT 161E)
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. English majors must take this class for 5 units.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 165:
Perspectives on American Identity (AMSTUD 160)
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*
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 169D:
Contemporary Asian American Stories (ASNAMST 169D)
This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of contemporary Asian American storytellers, with an emphasis on work produced within the past five years. We will investigate the pressures historically placed on Asian Americans to tell a certain kind of story e.g. the immigrant story in a realist mode and the ways writers have found to surprise, question, and innovate, moving beyond those boundaries to explore issues of race, sexuality, science, memory, citizenship, and belonging. Course materials will consist of novels, short stories, graphic narrative, and film, and may include work by Ocean Vuong, Mira Jacobs, Gish Jen, Charles Yu, and Adrian Tomine, as well as Lulu Wangs 2019 film The Farewell. This seminar will feature both analytical and creative components, and students will be encouraged to produce both kinds of responses to the material.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 172D:
Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE 100, EDUC 166C, PSYCH 155, SOC 146, TAPS 165)
Race and ethnicity are often taken for granted as naturally occurring, self-evident phenomena that must be navigated or overcome to understand and eradicate the (re)production of societal hierarchies across historical, geopolitical, and institutional contexts. In contrast, this transdisciplinary course seeks to track and trouble the historical and contemporary creation, dissolution, experiences, and stakes of various ethnoracial borders. Key topics include: empire, colonialism, capital/ism, im/migration, diaspora, ideology, identity, subjectivity, scientism, intersectionality, solidarity, resistance, reproduction, and transformation. Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center for Public Service . (Formerly CSRE 196C)
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 175:
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Embark on an engaging journey through medieval literature with Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," along with the works of Marie de France and Boethius. This course offers a vibrant exploration of storytelling, featuring interactive discussions, multimedia resources, and creative projects. Discover the rich tapestry of medieval thought, culture, and philosophy through a diverse range of texts. Dive into the world of knights, love, betrayal, and philosophical quests, making connections to contemporary issues. Ideal for anyone interested in the roots of modern literature and storytelling and the fascinating world of medieval society.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 177:
Contemporary Novel in U.S. Perspective (AMSTUD 177)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 177B:
Contemporary American Short Stories (AMSTUD 177B)
An exploration of the power and diversity of the American short story ranging from the 1970s to the present day. By examining short stories historically, critically, and above all as art objects, students will learn how to read, interpret, critique, and enjoy short stories as social, political, and humanist documents. Students will learn techniques to craft their own short stories and their own critical essays in a course that combines creative practice and the art of critical appreciation.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 180:
Public Service and Social Impact: Pathways to Purposeful Careers (CSRE 190A, INTNLREL 74, POLISCI 74B, PUBLPOL 75B, SOC 190A, SYMSYS 193, URBANST 190A)
How do I translate my interests and skills into a career in public service and social impact? This course will introduce you to a wide range of roles that help shape public policy and civic life, including government, education, nonprofits, social enterprises, and arts/media. It can be taken for one or two units. For one unit, you participate in a weekly, interactive speaker series designed to give you a sense for what different public service careers are like. Each week, guests describe their organizations and roles, highlight key intellectual issues and policy challenges, discuss their career paths, and describe skills crucial for the job. For a second unit, you participate in a hands-on weekly session designed to help you translate this knowledge into action. You will identify roles and organizations that might be a good match for you, build your network through informational interviewing, receive career coaching, and acquire the tools you need to launch your job or internship search. This course is intended for all students and all majors. Course content will be relevant to students soon entering the job market as well as those facing choices about courses of study and internships. Class sessions will be 60 minutes. This course is co-sponsored by the Haas Center for Public Service, the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Stanford in Government. Students taking the course for one unit (Tuesday lecture) must enroll in the -01 course option, and students taking the course for two units (Tuesday lecture and Thursday seminar) must enroll in the -02 course option. IR approved.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1-2
ENGLISH 180A:
Velocity and Suspension: The Sense of Time in Early Modern Writing
'A book that never ends, an ongoing book to tell you what is true.' Thus one literary critic describes the strangest of literary innovations from the late seventeenth century: the periodical form. Between 1641-1700, periodicals made up fully one-fourth of printed titles. Authors more often recognized as practitioners of other forms (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Frederick Douglass) also headed up their own journals as editors. This course, which prioritizes breadth of exposure, will also consider the temporal rhythms that a literary form like the periodical introduces and alters. By situating journalistic time within a range of calendrical regimes from the medieval period onward (the seasonal, monastic, public, scientific and yes, academic), students should find resources anew to guide their own practices of recurrent writing.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 184E:
Literary Text Mining
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. This class is enrollment by permission only. To request a spot in the class, please fill out the survey: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6PrXGyFeo7g5eNU
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-AQR
ENGLISH 184F:
Literary Text Mining 2: Studies in Cultural Analytics
In this course, students will learn how to apply quantitative and computational methods for analyzing text to questions that are of significance to Literary Studies, and the humanities more broadly. Beginning with a series of readings and discussions on the theoretical implications of using quantitative methods for literary analysis, we will move to in-depth instruction in more advanced methods for computational text analysis, including topic models, word embeddings, and large language models. Students will not only become familiar with training and querying these models, but, more importantly, will gain hands-on experience in how to build these analytical techniques into humanities-based research.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-AQR, WAY-FR
ENGLISH 185B:
'In her this brutal monster': Fiction of Mental Illness (FEMGEN 185B)
'In her this brutal monster': Literature of Mental Illness. How have literary traditions of madness informed modern fiction's portrayals of the human mind, particularly in the context of rapidly shifting cultural frameworks about the origins and manifestations of mental illness? What are the repercussions of new forms, trends and genres for parsing (or blurring) the line between condition and personhood? Using the novels of Akwaeke Emezi, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Leslie Marmon Silko to guide our inquiries, we'll consider inherited and new metaphors of madness in light of emerging theoretical interpretations of disability, identity, gender and trauma.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 186B:
The American Underground: Crime and the Criminal in American Literature
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ENGLISH 187C:
The Evolution of the Feminist First-Person Essay, 2000-present (FEMGEN 187C)
The internet age has coincided with the rise of new and reinvented modes of nonfiction writing by women online. The feminist first-person essay (what simply goes by ¿personal essay¿ in the business) has transformed internet writing formally, politically, and economically. The explosion innpopularity and shareability of this nonfiction subgenre has generated a host of new media and catapulted a new coterie of women writers into prominence. Which authors have exerted the most influence upon this new subgenre, how does the emergence of the first-person essay by women signify a mainstreaming of feminist dialectic, and how has this emergence been received by both a popular readership and the media establishment?nThis discussion-based course will investigate how the growth of the feminist first-person essay has promoted new publications and modes of publication. It will trace the genesis of the online personal essay genre from public journals like LiveJournal, Blogspot, and Tumblr, via its codification in online publications like The Toast, The Rumpus, Gawker, Jezebel, Guernica, The Hairpin, The Awl, and xoJane, to its eventual breakthrough into established newspapers, magazines, and traditionally published memoirs and essay collections.nWe will investigate questions like: How can the rendering of one individual's story benefit the political mandate of the collective? What is the first person¿s effect, and affect, in interspersing an author¿s personal experience, and what feminist potential does it contain? How does the myth of journalistic ¿objectivity¿ conflict with the presentation of the first person, and how has this objectivity myth descended from patriarchal tropes of legitimation? What do the terms ¿confessional¿ and ¿silence-breaking¿ connote? How has social media simultaneously empowered these new modes of public feminist dialogue and also exposed feminist public intellectuals to alarming levels of harassment and abuse? How successfully has the personal essay subgenre acted in de-centering hegemonic identity structures including whiteness, class privilege, and heterosexuality? What role has the feminist first-person essay played in the emergence of heavily digitized political movements including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo? What is ¿trauma porn¿, and how does it interface with the capitalistic structures of the first-person essay economy; what problems arise when capitalism and confessionalism intersect?
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 188:
Black Feminism and the SciFi of Octavia Butler (AFRICAAM 183, FEMGEN 188)
Octavia Butler's novels often begin with the question, 'how am I going to survive?' In short order, they usually ask next: what is trying to kill me?' In Butler's hands, these two questions produce theories of power and resistance, anarchy and tyranny, the death of planets and the birth of species. For the Black women at the center of Butler's novels, race and gender are explicitly inseparable from these questions, naming the violent systems imposed by an antagonistic world and the imperatives which give rise to strategies of response. At this intersection, Butler explores the fiercely practical and interpersonal politics of survival that women like her have had to fashion since the birth of the modern world. And with grim clarity, Butler invents worlds capable of holding a mirror to this one, extrapolating entire systems from those daily threats which test the limits of what can be thought and known. Are 'race' and 'gender' used to categorize humanity, or are they the tools used to invent the very category of 'the human'? Is culture constrained by our biology or is 'biology' a cultural construction? Can humanity harness our collective intelligence to avert the end of the world? Or is our collective intelligence what's killing us? These novels evoke a long tradition of Black feminist community organizing and have inspired contemporary strategies of organizing in turn. And they join Black feminist cultural theorists in untangling the predicaments of the 19th-21st centuries, not flinching at apocalyptic visions of futures we have already failed to prevent. Studying both of these Black feminist traditions alongside four of Octavia Butler's novels, we ask how such strategies of knowing and doing can possibly relate to one another, and what use we can put them to in the classroom and beyond.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 190:
Intermediate Fiction Writing
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. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190A:
AAPI Fiction Writing (ASNAMST 190)
This intermediate fiction writing course will feature readings from a variety of contemporary AAPI fiction writers. We will examine the various approaches and forms writers have utilized in writing about subjects political and personal. We will also look beyond the story itself to understand the authors' approaches to centering the AAPI experience, confronting intergenerational trauma, employing multilingual dialogue, repurposing genre, and navigating the ethics of incorporating family narratives. Students will write their own short stories which will be workshopped by the class. Entry into the course is via application.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 190D:
Dialogue Writing
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.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 190E:
Novel Writing Intensive
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. Prerequisite: 90 or 91. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190F:
Fiction into Film
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 190G:
The Graphic Novel
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190H:
The Graphic Novel
Continuation of English 190G. 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. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190HF:
Hybrid Forms: Creative Writing Across Genres (ENGLISH 192HF)
What can we learn about fiction when it's written with the concision of a poem? What can we learn about the elliptical thinking of poetry through an extended essay? What freedoms do certain forms allow and take away? This writing workshop focuses on hybrid forms that cross traditional boundaries of genre. Students will read in a wide variety of models, including flash fiction and prose poetry and longer forms that combine genres. We'll discuss how these pieces challenge our expectations, then respond with our own writing. Weekly exercises will culminate in a longer multi-genre project that your share in workshop. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190HO:
Creatures of the Dark: Ghosts and Ghouls of Horror Fiction
What is horror? Why does it appeal to us, and what makes it successful? This intermediate-level fiction class seeks to explore the dark side of our imaginations through a variety of historical and contemporary contributions to the genre, from Mary Shelley to Victor LaValle. Students will practice craft techniques in a series of short writing assignments and study plot construction, the suspension of disbelief, and propulsive action in service of their readers. Prerequisite: English 90 or 190.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190L:
Levinthal Tutorial in Fiction
Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in fiction. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Students will meet once per week with the Stegner Fellow and also four times a quarter in discussions sections with other students and the Levinthal Program Coordinators. Times to be announced upon acceptance. Prerequisites: any course in 90 or 91 series; submitted application and manuscript.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 190LC:
Levinthal Tutorial in Graphic Novel/Comics
Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in graphic novel/comics. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Students will meet once per week with the Stegner Fellow and also four times a quarter in discussions sections with other students and the Levinthal Program Coordinators. Times to be announced upon acceptance. Prerequisites: any course in 90, 91, or 92 series; submitted application and manuscript.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 190M:
Intermediate Queer Stories
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.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190NS:
Novel Salon
Who better to discuss a book with than its author? In this course we will immerse ourselves in eight novels and meet with their authors to hear about their drafting, revising, and publishing experiences. We will read as writers¿for inspiration and craft¿and analyze novels for structure, scope, character development, dialogue, setting, style, and theme. We will examine how craft conventions are applied and subverted, while asking, ¿What makes a novel work?¿ Students will write about, discuss, and present the novels we read, participate in Q&A with visiting authors, and complete in-class writing exercises designed to inform and inspire. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190QN:
Quantum Narratives
Intermediate course in the craft and art of fiction writing, focusing on speculative fiction.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 190S:
Short Story Salon
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.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190SL:
Light Through Language: Service Learning Through Creative Writing
This course merges the art of creative writing with service learning in the greater Bay Area. Students travel to St. Basil School in Vallejo three times over the course of the quarter and complete 15 total hours of fieldwork, providing classroom guidance and support to 6th-8th grade Language Arts students. Students will also collaborate and lead short writing activities in the field, developing a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity while discovering what it means to be a socially-engaged artist. The course culminates in an on-campus public reading featuring Stanford students and St. Basil students. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 2-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190SW:
Screenwriting Intensive
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
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 190V:
Reading for Writers
Taught by the Stein Visiting Writer. Prerequisite: Introductory prose course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 20 units total)
ENGLISH 190W:
Contemporary Women Writers (FEMGEN 190W)
"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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 190YA:
Young Adult Fiction
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 191:
Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
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. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 191DC:
DCI Intermediate Memoir Workshop
Open to DCI Fellows & Partners only. DCI Intermediate Memoir Workshop will take as its occasion for your creative development a continuing examination of memoir essays and memoir book excerpts. These texts broadly innovate within and outside of the formal traditions you studied in DCI Memoir workshop, to find new and exciting ways to represent personal experience. We will read authors including Kathryn Harrison, Brian Doyle, Jerald Walker, Patricia Hampl, MFK Fisher, Jo Ann Beard, and Tressie McMillan Cottom. This course will also serve as the continuing examination and practice of formal memoir writing. My goal for your learning in this class is that you walk out of our last session having done the following: 1) Written a next piece to follow in some way on your work in DCI Memoir: a new or next chapter, a related or new essay, an expansion into a larger piece, etc. 2) Looked at more sophisticated models for writing about your own life in a meaningful way, including hybrids of journalism and personal writing (e.g., The New Yorker), deep dives into personal subjects that twin with passions or areas of expertise, travel writing, and lyric forms of the essay. 3) Written two Short Essays based on more sophisticated writing prompts. 4) Participated in whole-class workshops for both Short Essays, and in a full-class workshop for your next piece. 5) Practiced giving and receiving helpful individual and workshop peer feedback. A variety of creative prompts, critical exercises, and assigned readings will foster your understanding and appreciation of creative nonfiction, as well as your growth as a creative writer. Energetic, committed participation is a must.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 191L:
Levinthal Tutorial in Nonfiction
Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in nonfiction. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Students will meet once per week with the Stegner Fellow and also four times a quarter in discussions sections with other students and the Levinthal Program Coordinators. Times to be announced upon acceptance. Prerequisites: any course in 90 or 91 series; submitted application and manuscript.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 191V:
Reading for Creative Non-Fiction Writers
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.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192:
Intermediate Poetry Writing
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.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192AP:
Intermediate Arab and Arab-American Poetry
In this 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. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192B:
Poetry Is Not a Luxury (AFRICAAM 192B, FEMGEN 192B)
Poetry Is Not a Luxury * These places of possibility within ourselves are dark... The titles of this course are words thought and dreamed by Audre Lorde in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (a version of which was first published in 1977). In this essay she writes: "For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare." In this course we will consider the powers, resuscitations, and strategies found in the texts of a constellation of contemporary Black poets whose work emerges out of Black feminist thought and practices. My hope is that we will together listen toward the possibilities of this work, and through experiments in reading and writing, realize some of what these texts make it possible for us to think and feel and write and be.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 192HF:
Hybrid Forms: Creative Writing Across Genres (ENGLISH 190HF)
What can we learn about fiction when it's written with the concision of a poem? What can we learn about the elliptical thinking of poetry through an extended essay? What freedoms do certain forms allow and take away? This writing workshop focuses on hybrid forms that cross traditional boundaries of genre. Students will read in a wide variety of models, including flash fiction and prose poetry and longer forms that combine genres. We'll discuss how these pieces challenge our expectations, then respond with our own writing. Weekly exercises will culminate in a longer multi-genre project that your share in workshop. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192L:
Levinthal Tutorial in Poetry
Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in poetry. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Students will meet once per week with the Stegner Fellow and also four times a quarter in discussions sections with other students and the Levinthal Program Coordinators. Times to be announced upon acceptance. Prerequisites: any course in 92 series; submitted application and manuscript.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 192PS:
Poetry Salon
Have you ever wanted to talk to the author after reading a favorite book? In this course, we will read seven collections of poetry and host their poets to discuss the processes behind each collection. We will read deeply (at the level of the poem) and consider widely (the ambition and arrangement of a book) with a focus on craft. Students will also write poems, participate in Q&A with visiting poets, and produce a small chapbook of their own work by the end of the quarter.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192V:
The Occasions of Poetry
Taught by the Mohr Visiting Poet. Prerequisite: 92. By application. Permission number required to enroll.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 20 units total)
ENGLISH 194C:
Curricular Practical Training
CPT course required for international students completing degree.Following internship work, students complete a research report outlining work activity, problems investigated, key results and follow-up projects. Meets the requirements for curricular practical training for students on F-1 visas. Student is responsible for arranging own internship and faculty sponsorship.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 196A:
Honors Seminar: Critical Approaches to Literature
Overview of literary-critical methodologies, with a practical emphasis shaped by participants' current honors projects. Restricted to students in the English Honors Program.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 197:
Seniors Honors Essay
In two quarters.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 198:
Individual Work
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.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Beaty, G. (PI);
Brewer, W. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Cravens, M. (PI);
Ekiss, K. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greif, M. (PI);
Holbert, J. (PI);
HolyWhiteMountain, S. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Jordan, A. (PI);
Kantor, R. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
Lee, C. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Michas-Martin, S. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Nguyen, H. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Phillips, P. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Quayson, A. (PI);
Richardson, J. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Shewmaker, M. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Tomar, R. (PI);
Trahan, J. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Williams, Z. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI);
Yu, E. (PI)
ENGLISH 199:
Why Literature Matters (To Me)
A hands-on, co-taught seminar with English and Creative Writing faculty/lecturers, featuring a complimentary commonplace book and fountain pen as gifts of the department. The development of topic or themes from reading, examination of commonplace books and manuscripts, friendship albums, notebooks, scrapbooks, and journals in Special Collections. Close reading of canonical poets and prose writers on their own reading experience. Study of and creative exercises in notation and annotation. Development of a final project in creative nonfiction on the topic of "Why Literature Matters to Me." Requirements: 5 literature courses in any department.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 202:
Practical Paleography
This is an Introduction to the major medieval hands that will help a scholar identify, date, and localize any manuscript they might encounter. The goal is to provide exposure to fundamental paleographic principles of features, aspect, scholarly descriptive language, paleographic historiography, and methodologies, to build an analytical toolset for future in-depth manuscript study. Over the course of ten sessions, team-taught by Stanford experts, students will gain broad exposure to a range of document types from a broad chronological and geographic sampling, learning how to apply paleographic analysis to these documents. Directed readings through the quarter will allow for further self-guided learning and provide a core of reference materials for future study. The emphasis is on practical skills acquisition for any student hoping to work with medieval documents. The course will be held in Stanford's Department of Special Collections and draw upon our extensive collection of medieval primary source materials and reference library of secondary literature and facsimiles. Weekly exercises will focus on transcription, paleographic feature recognition, comparison, and other hands-on exercises. For one unit, weekly attendance and participation is required. For two units, a substantial transcription and analysis final project will be added.
| Units: 1-2
ENGLISH 215E:
Shakespeare and His Contexts: Race, Religion, Sexuality, Gender
This course will explore contexts of race, religion, sexuality and gender in multiple Shakespeare plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest), with critical readings on topics including feminist and queer theory, transvestite theater, historically blackface performance, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, forced conversion, competing empires, colonialism and postcolonialism, and racial profiling (among others).
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 218:
Literature and the Brain (COMPLIT 138, COMPLIT 238, ENGLISH 118, FRENCH 118, FRENCH 218, PSYC 126, PSYCH 118F)
How does fiction make us better at reading minds? Why do some TV shows get us to believe two contradictory things at once? And can cognitive biases be a writer's best friend? We'll think about these and other questions in the light of contemporary neuroscience and experimental psychology, with the help of Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), season 1 of Westworld (Lisa Joy / Jonathan Nolan), and short readings from writers like Louise Glück, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. We'll also ask what we see when we read; whether the language we speak affects the way we think; and why different people react differently to the same book. Plus: is free will a fiction, or were you just forced to say that?
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 221:
Software, Hardware, Wetware: Cyberpunk Systems Theory
This course explores the ways we talk and think about how systems work, using nonfiction and science fiction to understand software, hardware, and wetware. A theoretical grounding in the tools used to analyze such systems from a humanistic perspective, including tools from cyber/data feminism, anti-orientalism, and queer theory, as well as practical experience in systems analysis. Students will produce soft/hard/wetware criticism of their own in addition to literary-critical argument. No coding experience required.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 224:
Doing Literary History: Orwell in the World (HISTORY 200K)
This course will bring together the disciplines of history and literary studies by looking closely at the work of one major twentieth-century author: the British writer and political polemicist George Orwell. In 1946, Orwell writes, "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art." In these years, Orwell writes about-- and often participates in or witnesses first-hand--a series of major events and crises. These include British imperialism in Burma, urban poverty in Europe, class inequality in England, the conflict between Socialism and Fascism in Spain, and the rise of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. In engaging all of these events, Orwell experiments with different literary forms, moving between fiction and non-fiction, novel and autobiography, essay and memoir, manifesto and fable, literature and journalism. Few writers demand such sustained and equal attention to text and context: in this course we will move back-and-forth between Orwell's varied writing and the urgent social and political contexts it addresses.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
ENGLISH 238E:
The Gothic in Literature and Culture (COMPLIT 118, ENGLISH 138E)
This course introduces students to the major features of Gothic narrative, a form that emerges at the same time as the Enlightenment, and that retains its power into our present. Surveying Gothic novels, as well as novellas and short stories with Gothic elements, we will learn about the defining features of the form and investigate its meaning in the cultural imagination. Gothic narratives, the course will suggest, examine the power of irrational forces in a secular age: forces that range from barbaric human practices, to supernatural activity, to the re-enchantment of modern existence. We will also consider the importance for Gothic authors and readers of the relation among narrative. spectacle and the visual arts. Primary works may include Ann Radcliffe's <e>The Italian, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey</e>, Victor Hugo's <e>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</e>, E.T.A. Hoffman's <e>The Sandman</e>, Mary Shelly's <e>Frankenstein</e>, and Edgar Allen Poe's <e>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym</e>. We may also do a section on vampires, including Bram Stoker's <e>Dracula</e>, and its remake in film by F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog. Critical selections by Edmund Burke, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Terry Castle, among others.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 239:
Henry James
In this course, we will read the three culminating novels of Henry James's 'major phase': The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. These are among the greatest and most profound novels in English. Many people also find them boring or unreadable. Unquestionably, their prose is difficult, with sentences so complex, wandering, and ambiguous, that the sense may be hard to construe. While very little action occurs, topics illuminated include love, money, sex-gender-sexuality, and evil. These three novels, taken seriously, have unusual powers to illuminate your future life, but also perhaps to mislead or ruin it. All are microscopic studies of social interaction, psychology, and selves. Recommended for very advanced and searching students and readers. Please enroll only if you find difficult prose manageable and rewarding, and you anticipate that these particular novels may speak to you at this stage of your life.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 244:
Literature and Technology from Frankenstein to the Futurists (COMPLIT 244, ITALIAN 244, ITALIAN 344)
Overview of defects and disorder across crystalline, amorphous, and glassy phases that are central to function and application, spanning metals, ceramics, and soft/biological matter. Structure and properties of simple 0D/1D/2D defects in crystalline materials. Scaling laws, connectivity and frustration, and hierarchy/distributions of structure across length scales in more disordered materials. Key characterization techniques. Pre-reqs: MATSCI 211 (thermo), 212 (kinetics)
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 244F:
Female Modernists: Women Writers in Paris Between the Wars (FEMGEN 244F)
The course will focus on expatriate women writers - American and British - who lived and wrote in Paris between the wars. Among them: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Margaret Anderson, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks, Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, and Jean Rhys. A central theme will be Paris as a lure and inspiration for bohemian female modernists, and the various alternative and emancipatory literary communities they created.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 250A:
Character: Studies in Fictional Being
Of all the components of prose fiction and the novel in particular, the most slippery is character. What kind of personhood is fictional personhood? What is a textual human? Do characters possess individuality or do they form networks or zones? Do these networks and zones extend beyond the boundary between fiction and reality to take in author and readers? If so, how? Are the categories by which we classify character - narrator, protagonist, antagonist, hero/heroine, etc. - adequate as descriptors of their function in a literary text? In this course, we will examine subgenres of the novel that focus on these questions, particularly the bildungsroman, autofiction, and novels in which a central character lacks interiority or self-awareness, and is therefore almost incapable of self-expression. How minimal can a character be? What happens when a first-person narrator, who is also a character, represents his or her altered consciousness? In such cases, who narrates? What resources does the novelist have to negotiate such formal contradictions? And what do we make of doubles, dybbucks, secret sharers, and other uncanny selves? Is character an infinite regression - fictions of fictions of persons? Authors may include Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Jane Bowles, Cormac McCarthy, J. M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Patrick Modiano, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk. Theorists may include M. M. Bakhtin, Ian Watt, Erich Auerbach, Dorrit Cohn, Maurice Blanchot, Franco Moretti, Catherine Gallagher, Alex Woloch.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 252:
Spatial Thinking Through Black Writing (URBANST 158)
This class will introduce students to various spatial theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Joseph Frank, Michel Foucault, etc. along with concepts such as spatial traversal, means of locomotion, and spatial morphologies through the novels and short stories of Black writers worldwide, including James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Walter Moseley, Richard Wright, Chinua Achebe, Ivan Vladislavic, Naguib Mahfouz, and others.
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 255:
Speaking Medieval: Ecologies of Inscribed Objects (GERMAN 255)
This class presents a survey of medieval German vernaculars and their documentation in manuscripts and on material objects. The languages include Gothic, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old English, and Old High German. Readings will include runic inscriptions, magic charms, proverbs and riddles, apocalyptic visions, heroic lays, and sermons and prayers. (This course must be taken for a letter grade and a minimum of 3 units to satisfy a Ways requirement.)Please note this course meets MW 1:30-2:50 and is taught by Professors Kathryn Starkey and Elaine Treharne.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 255A:
Old English Anew (ENGLISH 355A)
Why are the thoughts, feelings, and actions of English poets a millennium ago still so important in modern and contemporary poetry? Early English literature has long had an extraordinary influence on later writers from John Milton to Elizabeth Elstob, William Morris, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Denise Levertov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maria Dahvana Headley. This course will ask what is so special about these creative connections across time. We'll closely examine English lyrical, devotional, heroic, and fantastic poetry from the tenth to the twelfth centuries to consider the themes, ideas, and emotion that motivated later poets to adopt, adapt, and echo their age-old predecessors. Students will learn?through hard work?how to translate and evaluate Early English (getting an excellent knowledge of English grammar, lexis, and form into the bargain) in order to produce their own inventive poetry in the vein of inspired Old English shapers of verse.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 261E:
Black Mirror: Representations of Race & Gender in AI (AFRICAAM 261E, ENGLISH 152E)
tba
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 269B:
Becoming Modern: American Literature 1880-1920 (AMSTUD 269B)
Looking at the generation before the 'Lost Generation,' this course explores a period in which 'modernistic' techniques and representations were unfolding from the jangling dissonances, the jarring juxtapositions, and the tumbling orthodoxies that accompanied the tectonic technological and social shifts around the turn of the century. Topics and contexts include: immigration, urbanization, race, the 'New Woman,' cultural developments (vaudeville, cinema, ragtime and the blues), and contemporaneous theories of consciousness and sexuality.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 274:
Comedy and Social Critique
Comedy has been used to shine a no-holds-barred light on everything from the rise of fascism to the inanities of fashion. Over the decades, it has generated a number of questions. Some of these are ethical. What can we legitimately find funny or make fun of? Are there things we shouldn't laugh at? Can and should comedy be delimited or censored? When does comedy become abuse? When does it become hate speech? Some of the questions we will consider are more general: does comedy change through history? Is it culturally specific? Is it gender-specific? Is there a point at which these specifities give way to the possibility of a form of humor common to us all and the role laughter plays across human cultures. Finally, we will explore the expressive forms of comedy, including parody, satire, slapstick, tragi-comedy, the comics, stand-up, and physical comedy which raises the question of whether comedy can be said to reside in the body. Graduate and undergraduate students welcome.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 279:
Traveling Through Eternity: The Illuminated World of William Blake
tba
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 283:
The Sublime and the Ugly
Why is it that the aesthetic pleasures resulting from artistic representation so often depart from the "pure" ideal of beauty? Is tainted beauty more, or less, than beautiful? Is there any such thing as a "pure" aesthetic category, after all, or is all experience in relation to the arts hybrid? Pain may enhance pleasure in the case of the sublime, but where does disgust fit in? or does it? And what about ugliness? Campiness? Grotesqueness? The uncanny? This course is designed to put literary, psychoanalytic, sociological, architectural, post structural, and queer theory as well as philosophical and art historical writings in conversation with poetry, narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, and film, in order to develop a critical skill set designed not only to address such questions but, more critically for an active mind, to posit new ones.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 283E:
Self-Impersonation: Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir
Memoirists, autobiographers and novelists are commonly advised or advise others to 'write what you know.' But how do you know what you know? And what, when it comes down to it, are 'you' once you are put on the page, a human document? This course will examine the intersecting genres of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Topics will include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories; 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"; conceptions of childhood; race, sexuality and selfhood; and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of family, religious and cultural identity.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 287:
Moving the Message: Reading and embodying the works of bell hooks (AFRICAST 202, CSRE 202, DANCE 122, FEMGEN 201)
In this course, we will spend time reading, discussing and embodying the work of Black feminist theorist and teacher bell hooks. hook's work focuses on practices rooted in Black feminism, the role of love in revolutionary politics, rescuing ourselves and each other from hegemonic forces, and building the components necessary for a life of liberatory politics. Through a process grounded in movement improvisation, creative writing and expression we will explore how the words and theories of bell hooks can literally move us towards freedom and self recovery. This course is presented by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, IDA.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 290:
Advanced Fiction Writing
Workshop critique of original short stories or novel. Prerequisite: Intermediate prose workshop.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 291:
Advanced Creative Nonfiction
English 291 takes as its occasion for your creative and critical development an examination of essays and book excerpts in various creative nonfiction subgenres. These essays and excerpts work within traditional and innovative forms to find new and exciting ways to represent personal experience. This course also serves as the continuing examination and practice of creative nonfiction in English 191. You will write, workshop, present to the class, and revise drafts of work. All workshops will serve as the springboard for larger class conversations about theme and craft. A variety of creative prompts, critical exercises, and assigned readings will foster your understanding and appreciation of creative nonfiction, as well as your growth as a creative writer. All prompts will move you toward a culminating project of realizing either an essay to submit for possible publication or a draft book-length synopsis and outline. This course is designed for students who have completed English 191. Students who have completed creative nonfiction writing course elsewhere or who have extensive other writing workshop experience may petition the instructor for enrollment. Energetic, committed participation is a must.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 291DC:
DCI Advanced Memoir Workshop
Open to DCI Fellows and Partners only. DCI Advanced Memoir will take as its occasion for your creative and critical development an examination of essays and book excerpts in groundbreaking and traditional memoir forms. These texts broadly innovate within and outside of the formal traditions you studied in DCI Memoir and DCI Intermediate Memoir, finding new and exciting ways to represent personal experience. This section will also serve as the continuing examination and practice of those formal elements. You will write, workshop, present to the class, and revise at least two short essays, one long essay, and working drafts of excerpts from those essays. 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 written analysis, a reading response, starting a class discussion, and writing and discussing critiques of your colleagues' essays. A variety of creative prompts, critical exercises, and assigned readings will foster your understanding and appreciation of creative nonfiction, as well as your growth as a creative writer. Energetic, committed participation is a must.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 292:
Advanced Poetry Writing
The focus of the course will be both on the generation of new work and on strategies to solve artistic problems through studies in poetic craft.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 293:
Literary Translation: Theory and Practice (COMPLIT 293, DLCL 293)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 300:
Medieval Methodologies
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.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 1-3
ENGLISH 300A:
Theories and Methods in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE 300)
This course examines the concept of race, processes of racial formation, and theory and methods for the interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity. The course will focus on expressions and representations of race and racialization through comparative analyses and conceptualizations, and will feature guest lecturers drawn from within and beyond Stanford.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 303A:
The Interruption of the Machine: Introduction to Sound Studies through Literature (COMPLIT 333, ITALIAN 302, MUSIC 303, TAPS 302)
This course will introduce students to the field of Sound Studies (methodology, vocabulary, main claims) with a focus on the various sonic articulations of human-machine interactions in literature. The world of fiction as a sonic machine that articulates noise, sound, music, voice, or silence offers an excellent archive. We will read works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eça de Queirós, Mark Twain, the Italian Futurists, Zora Neale Hurston, and Luigi Pirandello. Secondary readings will include seminal contributions by R. Murray Schafer (the soundscape), Leo Marx (U.S. industrialization), Jacques Attali (noise and music), Mladen Dolar (philosophy and voice), Adriana Cavarero (gender, voice, and the body), Jonathan Crary (culture, aesthetics, and perception), Friedrich Kittler (media), and Daphne Brooks (black feminist sound).
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 307:
Theory and Practice of the American Short Story
According to the Russian formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, the American short story was not part of a transition to the novel but , the one fundamental and self-contained genre in American prose fiction, a parallel, self-contained, and developing tradition if anything more centrally located in the culture than the novel. Why then has short story theory and criticism fared so poorly in relation to that on the novel? We will face this question by exploring the emergence and development of the short story from the early nineteenth century, in authors ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Jhumpa Lahiri, emphasizing critical/theoretical readings, and with a focus on the relation between the short story and the contexts of its appearance (magazines, anthologies, collections, cycles, Creative Writing programs, the Internet, etc)."
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 308:
The Civilizing Process
This course considers historical changes in daily life, as practices and everyday ethics as well as ideas and rhetoric, to conceptualize the large-scale meanings of modernity and modernization, from roughly 1600 to the present. Beginning with a series of major thinkers from the mid-20th century Norbert Elias, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu we will assess the compatibility of their accounts of modern changes to domains they call, variously, habitus, interdependence, power, action, work, labor, and life. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to these theories. The second half will consider recent work in literary history, social and cultural history, gender and sexual theory, which has attempted to demarcate and explain a number of revolutions in human practices located in different historical moments and phases of the ongoing modernizing process: an affective revolution, humanitarian revolution, rights revolution, sex-gender and sexual revolutions, towards revolutions, too, of practices concerning nonhuman entities and statistical or aggregated visions of humanity. Though oriented to literary-historical knowledge, reading will be heavily historical and social-scientific; students are expected to absorb and respect the disciplinary and methodological canons of various disciplines, and graduate students from outside literature will be welcomed. This course is for graduate students only.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 308B:
Gilded Age American Literature
Introduction to the creative innovations and the political tensions that stemmed from the formation of a multicultural society during the age of industrialization. We will attempt to place literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, while also surveying recent critical and theoretical developments in areas such as Realism, Naturalism, Regionalism, Minority and Race Studies, and so on.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 313:
Performance and Performativity (FEMGEN 313, TAPS 313)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 314:
Epic and Empire (COMPLIT 320A)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 318:
Pitching and Publishing in Popular Media (DLCL 312, FEMGEN 312F)
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS (undergraduates enroll in 119) 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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 318A:
Advanced Workshop in Pitching and Publishing for Popular Media (FEMGEN 312G)
Graduate students may self-determine a popular media project¿such as an essay, column/series of essays, podcast, agent query, or book proposal¿to be completed, with consent, under the mentorship of the Graduate Humanities Public Writing Project. Prerequisite: Pitching and Publishing in Popular Media (DLCL 312/ENG 318/FEMGEN 312F), approved project proposal. Students will determine their individual meeting schedule with the instructor, and will also convene for at least one group meeting.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 319A:
The World, The Globe, The Planet
This course will introduce graduate students to several competing concepts of world-circulating literatures and methodologies for studying them. As the title suggests, the course introduces students to more established ideas of "World Literature", concepts around "globalization" and its distinction from the World category, as well as ideas of Planetarity, including ecocritical approaches.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 319C:
Utopian Realism and the Global South
What is Utopia and why does it generate so many different versions of itself, including, most powerfully, negations of itself as dystopia? As a vision of human perfectibility, Utopian literature has from its inception in Thomas More's Utopia (1517) been concerned with the social nature of humanity. It is always therefore political in nature. Almost exactly contemporaneous with the defining moments of the modern era (the conquest of the Americas, Machiavelli and modern politics, the emergence of modern literature in Cervantes, Luther and modern consciousness, printing and the beginning of the modern public sphere), Utopia is also unavoidably a product of the literary and imaginary worlds. Concerned with the development of Utopian and anti-Utopian thinking in the modern world, we will see how issues of science and technology, race and sexuality, freedom and determination, and salvation and apocalypse are embedded in the history of utopian literature and contemporary science fiction. Why did the modern world develop as it did? Can we imagine alternative worlds and histories? As future-oriented thinking, how does utopian literature offer possibilities for a better life? As a forum for future thinking Utopia also offers a platform for thinking anew the working of race and racial formations as well as constructions of gender in the contexts of what has been called "the Subject of Utopia." This course addresses the poetics and generative power of classic Utopian forms to examine how differing aesthetics as well as differing conceptions of history are linked fundamentally to the possibility of reshaping conceptions of race and gender in sustainable future orientations. Concerned with understanding how the traditional forms of the novel are altered in the context of the contemporary drive to represent a new stage in global and hemispheric race relations as well as by the forces of global climate change and the imperatives of decolonization, our readings will investigate how contemporary versions of literary realism change to represent the experiences of the crises of our time and the need to imagine alternative futures.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 320:
The Single Author Seminar
What is the value and use of engaging deeply with a single author's work? Each member of the seminar will select an author to focus on for the quarter based on their own research interests, and read a substantial body of the work of whatever author you choose. As a group, we will organize our discussion by themes that can unite many writers: the canonical anthology piece, the 'forgotten' minor work; historical context. We'll also address collaboration and other challenges to the individual author as a meaningful object of study. This seminar will also provide practice in engaging in scholarly conversation that does not revolve around shared primary texts.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 321:
Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Poetics
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 322:
Enlightenment and its Shadows: British Literature of the long Eighteenth Century
British literature of the long 18th century
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 323A:
Baroque Tragedy
A study of major theories of the baroque by theorists such as Wolfflin, Croce, and Benjamin together with a close reading of baroque tragedies by Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Calderon, Racine, Joseph Simon, and others.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 333:
Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts Core Seminar (DLCL 333, MUSIC 332, PHIL 333)
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. In this year's installment, we will focus on issues about the nature of fiction, about the experience of appreciation and what it does for us, about the ethical consequences of imaginative fictions, and about different conceptions of the importance of the arts in life more broadly. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2-4
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 20 units total)
ENGLISH 341:
High Life and Low Life: Polite and Popular Forms in 18th-century British Literature
In this course we will examine the complex relationship between elite and 'popular' forms - old forms and new - in the 18th-century English literary imagination. We will consider, for example, the way new so-called popular or 'low' genres¿criminal biography, travel literature, political tracts, newspapers, cartoons, broadsheets, conduct books and the like - typically produced for a newly-literate, largely middle-class audience, eager for 'entertainment'¿began shaping so-called 'mainstream' Augustan literature more and more over the century. At the same time we will track the declining fortunes of the traditional so-called 'neoclassical' literary ideals represented in the works of Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and other 'elite' writers of the period, all of whom had absorbed and wished to preserve an active reverence for the works of classical antiquity. But we will also be concerned with the 'real-world' implications of the contemporary imaginative split between "high life" and "low life." By examining literary representations of various subcultures - and exemplary new social types such as the Criminal, the Hack, the Whore and the Madman - we will attempt to describe the historic significance of the high-low dialectic in classic eighteenth-century works, and the underlying and increasingly 'modern' and dynamic system of social, philosophical and ideological relations that gave rise to it.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 342:
Milton
This course reads through the poetry and prose of a writer whose whole course of life was given, as one critic puts it, to "pursuing practical ways of restoring paradise." Non-specialists are welcome; Milton arguably represents the single best figure from the English literary past with whom to think about the problem of poetry as a vocation. Depending on participant interest, a portion of this seminar may be set aside for joint preparation towards the departments comprehensive exam.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 343:
Culture and Subculture
This course will look at classic writings on cultures and subcultures, publics and counterpublics/"intimate publics," highbrow and lowbrow, both to map some basics about representations and corresponding cultural identities -- and to begin a practical project of inviting graduate students to research and write about contemporary subcultures after the transition to the internet.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 345G:
Modeling the Post45 Literary Field: Forms, Frames, Contexts, Themes
Exploration of various post45 literary phenomena with special attention to broader conceptual models in and by which they might be interpreted.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 346:
Thinking Through Genre
What are we to make of the fact that individual literary texts always come to us as instances of larger generic forms? Why have some texts been thought more "generic" than others? Reading some key texts in the history of genre theory, this class will ponder these questions with specific reference to the modern novel.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 350:
Law and Literature
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).
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-4
ENGLISH 350D:
Constitutional Theory
(Same as LAW 7014.) The guiding question of this course will be how we should think about the role of the U.S. Constitution in American law and American life. In considering this issue, we will address debates about constitutional interpretation (including both originalism and living constitutionalism), the nature and features of constitutional change within the American context, the role of federalism and the separation of powers in the constitutional scheme, and the nature of American constitutionalism as opposed to English and continental European models. We will tackle these debates in the context of some specific contemporary controversies about the Constitution, including: How do the civil rights movement and other social movements impact our understanding of the Constitution?; Does the Constitution reject a European-style inquisitorial process in favor of an Anglo-American vision of due process?; How important is consensus within the Supreme Court to establishing the legitimacy of constitutional meanings?; Why do we have nine Supreme Court justices, and; What is the Constitution, and how much does it include outside of the written document? Throughout we will be contemplating the extent to which our interpretation of the constitution depends on our vision of American democracy and the good society.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 355A:
Old English Anew (ENGLISH 255A)
Why are the thoughts, feelings, and actions of English poets a millennium ago still so important in modern and contemporary poetry? Early English literature has long had an extraordinary influence on later writers from John Milton to Elizabeth Elstob, William Morris, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Denise Levertov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maria Dahvana Headley. This course will ask what is so special about these creative connections across time. We'll closely examine English lyrical, devotional, heroic, and fantastic poetry from the tenth to the twelfth centuries to consider the themes, ideas, and emotion that motivated later poets to adopt, adapt, and echo their age-old predecessors. Students will learn?through hard work?how to translate and evaluate Early English (getting an excellent knowledge of English grammar, lexis, and form into the bargain) in order to produce their own inventive poetry in the vein of inspired Old English shapers of verse.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 357:
Poetry, Transhistorically
The course considers representative works by ten poets from the Renaissance to the present. Each set of poems is framed by a problem in poetics discussed in recent theory, such as artifice and sound, the making of voice, the meaning of lyric, and the nature of historicist and biographical interpretation. Conversation in the seminar will move from particular poems to general problems and back again, according to the priorities of the members.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 357S:
Edward Said, or Scholar vs Empire (CSRE 357, GLOBAL 157, TAPS 157S, TAPS 357S)
How can an intellectual fight forces far larger than a single individual? How can solidarity be an antidote to racism? Why is there no distinction between the local and the global? What is the scholar's role in an alienating political climate? Why are criticism and humanism necessary partners? The author of Orientalism and world-changing frameworks such as Travelling Theory, Permission To Narrate, and Contrapuntal Reading, as well as remarkable texts, such as On Late Style and Representations of the Intellectual, teaches us how criticism can blunt instruments of empire. In this course, students observe the journey of one scholar as he writes between worlds against imperialist supremacy and colonial logic. They'll move from Exile to Indigeneity, Silence to Music, Centers to Margins, Victimhood to Dignity, West to East, Peace to Terror, Theory to Practice, Politics to Knowledge, Religiosity to Secularism, Statehood to Fragmentation, and back.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 3-4
ENGLISH 360C:
History and Theory of the Novel I & II
Can the novel, as genre, be conceptualized or critically synthesized? This course will approach such a daunting question from its two necessary starting-points: fiction and theory. On the one hand, we'll take up several of those major novels that have so often been viewed as aesthetically foundational: most likely Don Quixote, Emma, Madame Bovary and The Brothers Karamazov. On the other hand, we'll read the major theoretical statements of Lukacs (Theory of the Novel, Studies in European Realism, The Historical Novel) and Bakhtin (The Dialogical Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), as well as text-specific criticism. This small group of texts might be seen as both necessary and insufficient to the largest questions of the genre. Our focus will be on closely reading and engaging each text in its inviting and demanding singularity and in building an open, imaginative and wide-ranging dialogue between fictions and theories. (This course might be followed by a class the next year on History and Theory of the Novel: Experiments, extending these questions in a number of further formal, geographic and chronological directions).
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 362C:
Language Politics and the Literary Imagination in Africa
This seminar considers the tremendous linguistic diversity of the African continent and the cultural, political, and socioeconomic dilemmas that define the question of language policy in Africa since decolonization. In the modern world, some languages die, and others are killed. In this course, we will ask how the slow or rapid death of a language - the phenomenon known as linguicide - is a crucial but underexplored dimension of colonialism and slavery in the Atlantic, Saharan, and Indian Ocean worlds. In my usage, the search for a mother tongue denotes an array of literary and linguistic efforts to unify disparate peoples and to heal the divisions of colonialism in Africa and its diaspora. This phrase names an aspiration for individual and collective restoration of selfhood through language. But this effort has come at the cost of intense internal conflict in the African world. The quest for linguistic restoration is a key determinant of internecine strife and civil war in Africa. In Sudan, for example, British colonial authorities employed indirect rule to elevate the Arabic-speaking Muslim populations in the northern regions at the expense of the linguistically and religiously diverse populations of southern Sudan. Over time, the south became politically subordinate to - and economically exploited by - the north, and this process of disenfranchisement fomented a protracted civil war of the late twentieth century that resulted in the secession, in 2011, of South Sudan from Sudan. How have creative writers, theorists, and policy makers sought to reconstitute the colonized self via language and linguistic practices such as state-imposed language rationalization policies or the collective recovery of lost languages? And how do these thinkers strive to resolve or reimagine ongoing antagonisms in literary form? This course ponders these questions via readings of key authors such as Ngugi wa Thiong¿o, Assia Djebar, Abdulrazak Gurnah (winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature), Leila Lalami, and Sulaiman Addonia, among others."
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 362E:
Toni Morrison: Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature
This course will take a close look at Toni Morrison's oeuvre to explore question of Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature. Texts to be looked at will include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise, Beloved, Love, and Playing in the Dark, among others.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 363:
Modern Physics and Literature (APPPHYS 363)
Reading and discussion of selected works of contemporary literature (fiction) and philosophy that engage concepts of modern physics grounded in relativity and quantum theory. This is intended as a seminar that mixes students from physical sciences and the arts/humanities, with no specific prerequisites-- we will discuss the physics invoked by works of fiction and philosophy in a conceptually rigorous but non-mathematical way. How do writers of speculative fiction make sense of challenging ontological claims from empirical science, what implications do they explore, and how is the worldview of theoretical physics augmented or contested?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2-4
ENGLISH 363C:
Women and Puritanism
dynamic between popular and established cultural forms, the formation of alternative and minority spiritualities, gender and historical representation, the relation of literary, religious, and political forms, and the advent of sentimentalism.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 366F:
Media Theory for Literary Studies
Introduction to media theory by way of some of its key texts and themes, with particular emphasis on how questions of medium, media, and mass media might be useful to literary studies in particular - that is, the study of predominantly textual artifacts. Works by Innis, McLuhan, Derrida, Adorno, Kittler, Hayles, Flusser and others.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 367E:
Contemporary Theory Lab (COMPLIT 367E, ILAC 367E)
This new graduate seminar examines the question of whether a new canon of theoretical monographs-as opposed to influential standalone essays or papers-has coalesced in recent years. We focus on a post-Foucaultian, post-1989 moment, understanding theory as an autonomous, interdisciplinary enterprise that is not subservient or reducible to philosophy or literary criticism but shares many of the core concerns of each discipline. The seminar provides students with a safe space to discuss cutting-edge ideas, arguing for, with, and against influential trends. We will study six to eight monographs in great detail, at least two of which will be determined by class vote. Of special interest are conceptual formations and methodologies that do not have an institutional home or pursue a narrow political agenda. Topics include anticolonial thinking, new materialism, affect studies, and the shadow of the linguistic turn. We may draw from a roster of thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Saidiya Hartman, Verónica Gago, Sianne Ngai, Rob Nixon, Sara Ahmed, Martin Hägglund, Arturo Escobar, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, and Fred Moten. Previous experience with theory is recommended. Assignments sequence short papers with revisions, short student presentations, and a final paper. Stanford faculty and outside guests will be a mainstay. Broader community engagement with theory, as well as student integration of the subject matter towards their independent research projects, will be central goals. Open to co-terms, masters, and PhD students in the humanities and social sciences.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 368A:
Imagining the Oceans (COMPLIT 368A, FRENCH 368A)
How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might include Cook, Banks, Equiano, Ricketts, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Critical readings include Schmitt, Rediker and Linebaugh, Baucom, Best, Corbin, Auden, Sontag and Heller-Roazen. Films by Sekula, Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar coordinated with a 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to the Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park. Open to graduate students only.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 370:
The Sustainability of the Human Record (GERMAN 375, SUSTAIN 350)
What happens in the year 12,021 when future generations seek to understand the extensive record of human endeavour, experience, and life, today and previously? What will constitute a future Rosetta Stone that makes accessible surviving monuments, texts, and languages of 2021; that ensures future people will know how to avoid the deadly nuclear dumps and climate breakdown created now? How can we seek to guarantee in the present that the technologies upon which we rely will be legible and accessible in even mere decades to come?This course will focus on the recording and preservation of, and access to, human communication through its long history and into the next century. How is communication created, produced, and received? How sustainable are the many media and devices through which it is transmitted? What are the key components to sustaining an understanding of the human record without which one might argue very little really matters?
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 372D:
Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE 301)
an advanced introduction to concepts and debates within the multi-disciplinary field of comparative studies in race and ethnicity.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 373:
Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Critics
A close study of Shakespeare's major tragedies and exemplary criticism from the Restoration to the present.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 385:
Computationally Mapping the Literary Imagination
Computational approaches to fiction have given us a suite of new methods for understanding the role of space in literature. In this class, we will explore how the "spatial humanities" leverages these developments to aid us in identifying and exploring places within the imagined world of the novel. We will explore how named entity recognition and embedding spaces can be used to identify the places with the goal of extracting all place information, real or imaged, from a corpus of novels. We will also investigate visualization methods for spatial data (Geographic Information Systems/GIS, network theory) and study how a sense of space affords us new perspectives on the objects we study.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 389:
What was (is?) Modernism?
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 390:
Graduate Fiction Workshop
For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 392:
Graduate Poetry Workshop
For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 394:
Independent Study
Preparation for first-year Ph.D. qualifying examination and third year Ph.D. oral exam.
Terms: Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 394C:
Curricular Practical Training
CPT course required for international students completing degree. Following internship work, students complete a research report outlining work activity, problems investigated, key results and follow-up projects. Meets the requirements for curricular practical training for students on F-1 visas. Student is responsible for arranging own internship and faculty sponsorship.
Last offered: Summer 2023
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 396:
Introduction to Graduate Study for Ph.D. Students
Required for first-year graduate students in English. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 396L:
Pedagogy Seminar I
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 398:
Research Course
A special subject of investigation under supervision of a member of the department. Thesis work is not registered under this number.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-18
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greif, M. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kantor, R. (PI);
Lee, C. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Meyler, B. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Phillips, P. (PI);
Quayson, A. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Richardson, J. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI);
Yu, E. (PI)
ENGLISH 398A:
Graduate Pedagogy Committee Course
The graduate pedagogy committee course is a communal resource for graduate students in the department of English. It will host pedagogy materials, workshop information and other resources oriented towards pedagogy instruction and training. Maintained by members of the pedagogy committee, working with the Director of Graduate Studies, this course will be maintained throughout the year to serve as a platform for all pedagogy work in the graduate program. All students in the department are encouraged to enroll.
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 0 units total)
ENGLISH 398L:
Literary Lab (COMPLIT 398L)
Gathering and analyzing data, constructing hypotheses and designing experiments to test them, writing programs [if needed], preparing visuals and texts for articles or conferences. Requires a year-long participation in the activities of the Lab.
Terms: Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 2-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 398Q:
Qualifying Exam Workshop
Qualifying Exam Workshop for 1st year cohort
Terms: Sum
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 398R:
Revision and Development of a Paper
Students revise and develop a paper under the supervision of a faculty member with a view to possible publication.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 4-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greif, M. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kantor, R. (PI);
Lee, C. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Phillips, P. (PI);
Quayson, A. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Richardson, J. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI);
Yu, E. (PI)
ENGLISH 398W:
Orals, Publication and Dissertation Workshop
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.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 399:
Thesis
For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisors required. To enroll, make an appointment with English student services and provide confirmation of advisor consent.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greif, M. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kantor, R. (PI);
Lee, C. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Meyler, B. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Owens, T. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Phillips, P. (PI);
Quayson, A. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Richardson, J. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Staveley, A. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI);
Yu, E. (PI)
