ENGLISH 1D:
Dickens Book Club
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 9CA:
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 Creative Expressions 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. NOTE: Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
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: ;
Brewer, W. (PI);
Ekiss, K. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Ross, M. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Shewmaker, M. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Tomar, R. (PI);
Trahan, J. (PI)
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: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CP:
Poetry Off the Page
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.nNOTE: Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9CT:
Special Topics in Creative Expression
Focus on a particular topic or process of creative expression. 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. NOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot. May repeat for credit.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 3 units total)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 9R:
Humanities Research Intensive (ARTHIST 9R, EALC 9R, HISTORY 9R)
Everyone knows that scientists do research, but how do you do research in the humanities? This five-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 in Special Collections and the East Asia Library, 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 and sophomores only. All majors and undeclared students welcome. No prior research experience necessary. Enrollment limited: apply by 11/4/19 at hri-fellows.stanford.edu.
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 first three weeks will be devoted to the work of Margaret Atwood, who will visit the class. The remaining seven weeks will explore other speculative fiction, broadly defined and across era and geography, that also engages with oppression and freedom, sex, love, and other dynamics of power. 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: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 2 units total)
ENGLISH 10C:
Introduction to English I: Tradition and Individuality, Medieval to Early Modern
This course offers a comprehensive introduction to English literature from its beginning in the medieval period to the early seventeenth century. We will study individual literary voices and styles in the context of a growing national tradition. We will discuss major authors (such as Chaucer, More, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Donne) and analyze representative literary works in a variety of genres, from the Old English elegy and Middle English lyrics to the Elizabethan sonnet, Renaissance comedy, and the allegorical epic. While the course equips students with specific analytical and interpretative tools necessary for a historical understanding of literature, it is equally committed to revealing the aesthetic interest that medieval and early modern literature still holds for the modern reader.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 11A:
Introduction to English II: From Milton to the Romantics
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: 5
ENGLISH 11B:
Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (AMSTUD 150)
(Formerly English 23/123). A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 12A:
Introduction to English III: Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, AMSTUD 12A)
(Formerly English 43/143). In his bold study, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth Warren defines African American literature as a late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century response to the nation's Jim Crow segregated order. But in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement, can critics still speak, coherently, of "African American literature"? And how does this political conception of African American literary production compare with accounts grounded in black language and culture? Taking up Warren's intervention, this course will explore African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals and slave narratives to texts composed at the height of desegregation and decolonization struggles at mid-century and beyond.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 12C:
Introduction to English III: Modern Literature
Survey of the major trends in literary history from 1850 to the present.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
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.
Terms: Win
| 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 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.
Terms: Aut
| 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 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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 40N:
Theatrical Wonders from Shakespeare to Mozart
What is the secret of theatrical illusion? How does the theater move us to wonder, sympathetic identification, and reflection? How can the theater help society understand and manage social conflict and historical change? We will ask these questions through a close examination--on the page and on the stage--of dramatic masterpieces by Shakespeare and Mozart. We will attend live performances of Gounod's opera Romeo and Juliet and of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro. No prior knowledge of music or foreign languages is required; neither is prior experience in theatricals.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
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 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.nnThe course will meet M/W 5-7 PM with optional Friday studio time. The first meeting is Monday, April 15.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
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)
Ideas matter. Concepts such as revolution, tradition, and hell have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like immigration, universal basic income, and youth play an important role in contemporary debates in the United States. All of these ideas are contested, and they have a real power to change lives, for better and for worse. In this one-unit class we will examine these ¿dangerous¿ ideas. Each week, a faculty member from a different department in the humanities and arts will explore a concept that has shaped human experience across time and space. Some weeks will have short reading assignments, but you are not required to purchase any materials.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 80N:
Modern "Meanings of Life": Aestheticism, Perfectionism, Ecstasy
This course asks about the "meaning of life" in our time, the 21st century, and over the past 200 years. It proposes that some classic reasons for living, and modes of giving value to life, ethics, religion, family are no longer particularly active; while new, poorly articulated and ill-acknowledged systems of life-evaluation rule our senses of meaning. In particular, the course will discover, try to systematize, and then test a few of these covert modern life philosophies: aestheticism; perfectionism; ecstasy. Representatives of more classic systems of meaning Christian experience, and Aristotelian ethics will offer comparative cases. Students will be challenged to articulate and evaluate their own reasons for living and anticipated meanings of life, and to become skillful interpreters of both art and ideas in texts, learning methods from literature, philosophy, and history. They should also develop richer and more precise understandings of those contested terms, modern and modernity. Readings may include Wordsworth, Thoreau, Flaubert, Aristotle, Thomas à Kempis, Theresa of Avila, Whitman, Dickinson, Sontag, plus contemporary sources.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
ENGLISH 81:
Philosophy and Literature (CLASSICS 42, COMPLIT 181, FRENCH 181, GERMAN 181, ILAC 181, ITALIAN 181, PHIL 81, SLAVIC 181)
What, if anything, does reading literature do for our lives? What can literature offer that other forms of writing cannot? Can fictions teach us anything? Can they make people more moral? Why do we take pleasure in tragic stories? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It addresses key questions about the value of literature, philosophical puzzles about the nature of fiction and literary language, and ways that philosophy and literature interact. Readings span literature, film, and philosophical theories of art. Authors may include Sophocles, Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Proust, Woolf, Walton, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Students master close reading techniques and philosophical analysis, and write papers combining the two. This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 82N:
Thinking about Photographs
The course will begin with a short history of photography since the 19th century; followed by both a hands-on exploration of different types of photographs (possibly using the Cantor Collection) and then a more theoretical discussion of some of the acknowledged classics of photographic writing (Susan Sontag's On Photography, Roland Barthes' Camera lucida, Linfield's The Cruel Radiance.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: 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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 87N:
The Conscience
What kind of science, or knowledge, does the con-science impart? How does this knowledge relate to what one nineteenth-century thinker called the ¿intellectual conscience¿? The indeterminacy of conscience¿s claims makes it a subject that all but demands close reading, and it is a matter of historical fact that ethical reasoning has often taken place within and through literary forms. This course thus takes the scientific efflorescence of the early modern period (c. 1500-1800) as its historical center of gravity, but focuses above all on the development of interpretive habits. Proceeding through texts long associated with crises of conscience (selections may include Genesis, Macbeth, Moll Flanders), we will consider how the creative force of interpretation bears on evolving conceptions of ethical inquiry and intellectual obligation.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER
ENGLISH 90:
Fiction Writing
The elements of fiction writing: narration, description, and dialogue. Students write complete stories and participate in story workshops. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter). 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
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Clark, H. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Sears, M. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Tomar, R. (PI);
Trahan, J. (PI);
Whitmore, R. (PI)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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.
Terms: Aut, Spr
| 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 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. May be repeated for credit. 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
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Brewer, W. (PI);
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Smith, A. (PI);
Trahan, J. (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: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
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: Win, Spr
| 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.
Terms: Win
| 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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 92:
Reading and Writing Poetry
Prerequisite: PWR 1. Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. May be repeated for credit. 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
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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.
Terms: Win
| 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. 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 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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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 101C:
Pursuits of Happiness
This course offers a critical and historical examination of our culture¿s obsession with defining, measuring, and representing happiness. We will explore the sources of contemporary ideas about happiness in nineteenth-century debates over the relationship between self and society; the shifting balance of desire and duty; and the complex entanglement of art, morality, and pleasure. Readings will include influential philosophical accounts of happiness from across the century, alongside major literary representations of the happiness and misery of modern life in works by Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, and Wilde. We will consider literature¿s special power to evoke visions of the happy life, even as it questions dominant ideas about the nature and value of happiness. At the same time, we will reflect on the ways happiness informs our reading, writing, and thinking about literary texts¿above and beyond the satisfactions of a happy ending.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 103B:
Introduction to Old English Language and Literature: Writing Stories and History in Anglo-Saxon Age
Students will learn the language skills necessary to parse and translate the earliest literature written in the English language. The course will look at how Anglo-Saxon authors used the particularly rich qualities of their vernacular to craft texts that represent and reflect on war, a principal institution of their medieval society. Our discussion will consider how the conventions of genre and form, as well as contextual forces like religion, cultural tradition, and contemporary history, shaped their writing on the subject.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 105E:
Early Medieval English Poetry
This course introduces students to the earliest recorded poems of the English medieval period. Material in this course will range from the seventh through to the end of the fourteenth century and will include a variety of poetic genres: epic and elegy, lyric and lament, riddle and romance, and more. We will encounter heroes, saints, lovers, mourners and monsters. Students will conduct close readings of individual works as well as situate poems in broader historical and literary contexts. Additionally, the readings are selected to showcase the development of the English language as it transitioned between Old and Middle English as well as shifting cultural influences from within Britain to medieval Europe more broadly. Sample texts: Cædmon¿s Hymn, Beowulf, Dream of the Rood, Exodus, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 106B:
Bad Taste
While English classes usually focus on works of art and literature collectively considered good, this class revels in the bad: the embarrassing or disgusting, the artistic failure, the guilty pleasure. With the help of some influential theorists of aesthetic badness, and a selection of ¿bad¿ examples drawn from poetry, fiction, film, and visual art, we will examine the categories¿ugly, kitschy, campy, sappy, problematic, and so on¿that have been and continue to be used to police what is and is not art, and to distinguish ¿good¿ art from ¿bad.¿ We will consider how artistic hierarchies become entangled with other kinds of hierarchies, exploring how ¿bad¿ art both sustains and subverts racial, sexual, and economic power. Why, for example, are the terms ¿rom com¿ and ¿chick flick¿ so often used dismissively? What makes a work of art provocative and avant-garde, rather than offensive¿or simply gross? And when does the ¿merely¿ bad become ¿so-bad-it¿s-good¿? In the final three weeks of the course, the students will be asked to reflect on the terms they themselves use to evaluate and describe cultural products, and to provide categories and case studies from their own experiences as consumers.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 108A:
Intro to Disability Studies: Disability and Technology (HUMBIO 178A)
For a long time, disability studies has focused on the past, early representations of people with disabilities and histories of the movement for disability rights. This course turns toward the future, looking at activism and speculative fiction as critical vehicles for change. Drawing on fiction by Samuel Beckett, Muriel Rukeyser, and Octavia Butler, this course will address the question of the future through an interrogation of the relationship between disability and technology, including assistive technology, genetic testing, organ transplantation.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 109A:
Riotous Assemblies (1660-1730)
By the close of the eighteenth century, the First Amendment to the US Constitution would acknowledge a right to assembly; in England a century before, no such right existed. This course considers how print media in this period (incl. newspapers, petitions, plays) convened embodied assemblies (the coffeehouse, the theater) as well as more suspect, disembodied ones (virtual congregations of religious and political dissidents). What we might call riotous texts summoned unruly gatherings¿ones that could never be fully subject to state control.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 112B:
Introduction to African Literature (AFRICAAM 112B)
This course will be an exploration of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of the African continent. We will examine various elements (genre, form, orality, etc.) across a variety of political, social, and literary categories (colonial/postcolonial, modernism/postmodernism, gender, class, literary history, religion, etc.). We will also address issues such as African literature and its relationship to world literature and the question of language and of translation. Writers to be discussed will include Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Kamel Daoud, Tayeb Salih, and NoViolet Bulawayo, among others.nThe class will be structured around the close-reading of passages from individual texts with an attempt to relate the details derived from the reading process to larger areas of significance within the field. Students should make sure to bring their texts to class with them and must be prepared to contribute to class discussions.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 113:
'The secret of deep human sympathy': Great Victorian Novels
The Victorian period is often referred to as the Age of the Novel: never before or since did fiction play such a central part in the English literary landscape. Through a close scrutiny of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, this course will probe the formal innovations of four major nineteenth-century writers. Each novel will be tackled through five main approaches: the contexts that informed the work (such as the development of London, evolving attitudes towards criminality, subjectivity, childhood, and biology); the impact of publication methods on the novel (Oliver Twist and Tess of the d¿Urbervilles originally appeared in periodicals as, respectively, a monthly and a weekly serial; Jane Eyre and Adam Bede were first published as three-volume novels); innovations with narrative voice (for example how the novelists make use of third-person omniscient and first-person narration, and how and why they address the reader); the novels¿ stylistic particularities (from their manipulation of imagery to their experimentation with genre); and the major critical debates surrounding them (such as recent discussions concerning the extent to which the Victorian novel consolidated or challenged nineteenth-century values). Throughnour four novels, we will span the Victorian period, from Queen Victoria¿s arrival on the throne to anxieties and experimentations of the fin-de-siècle.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 115:
Virtual Italy: Methods for Historical Data Science (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 115A:
Shakespeare and Modern Critical Developments
Approaches include gender studies and feminism, race studies, Shakespeare's geographies in relation to the field of cultural geography, and the importance of religion in the period.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 115F:
Tragedy: Forms and Conflicts (COMPLIT 139, TAPS 115F)
This course introduces students to central questions of tragedy. Why do we find tragic spectacle so compelling, even pleasurable? What role does conflict play in individual selfhood and social formation? And why does tragedy elicit such strong theoretical and philosophical responses? At the same time, the course provides an introduction to literary history through the study of genre. What might connect modern tragedy to ancient Greek drama? How are genres transformed through reading, commentary, and adaptation? The course will be based on close reading and discussion of authors including Sophocles, Seneca, Shakespeare, Calderon, Milton, and Buchner.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 117B:
 Environmental and Animal Masterpieces
Works of nonfiction or fiction notable for their social influence as well as their intellectual and aesthetic power; books might include Walden, My First Summer in the Sierra, Green Acres, A Sand County Almanac, Silent Spring, Desert Solitaire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, The World Without Us, Black Beauty, or others.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 118A:
Illness in Literature
This class provides an overview of illness narratives in fiction from the 19th century to the present. We will examine how authors use language, plot, and structure to portray illness and even recreate its sensations within the reader. We will also study how domestic arrangements, art, medicine and technology mediate the experience of disease. Our discussion of fiction will be buttressed by theoretical texts about the function (and breakdown) of language when deployed to describe physical and mental suffering. Finally, we will consider the ethics of writing about illness. What does it mean to find beauty in descriptions of pain? What role can literature play in building empathy for experiences we have not (yet) experienced ourselves?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 121D:
"Hard" Science Fiction
What makes hard science fiction "hard"? What's the science? What's the fiction? And why do we care about the difference? In this course, we will investigate different traditions of hard science fiction, trace the interactions between "real" science and science fiction, and consider the scientific education and outreach potential of hard science fiction. We will read, watch, and play hard science fiction that draws on a number of domains: physics, data science, linguistics, biology, politics, and others. Course texts will include works by Ted Chiang & Carl Sagan, episodes of Star Trek, and fan reviews & commentary. We will conclude the course by thinking about the relationship between science fiction, academia, and literary prestige - asking questions about why, how, and to whom this genre matters.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
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: Spr
| 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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 126A:
The Country and the City: Mapping Nineteenth-Century British Literature
As the 2016 Presidential Election so powerfully demonstrated, the divide between urban and rural life remains fundamental to the contemporary American experience. This course traces the emergence of that contrast¿both a geographic and economic reality and a construction of art and politics¿in nineteenth-century Britain, as the widespread changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution redrew the social map along the dividing lines between the country and the city. Alongside key works of realist fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, we will read a selection of short texts from a range of styles and genres. From Wordsworth¿s pastoral idylls to the ¿nether world¿ of Gissing¿s London slums, we will explore how writing about the country and the city responds to transformations across the century in social relationships and individual and collective identity, economic and political power, manners and morals, and conceptions of nature and the environment. The course will conclude with excerpts from two works of non-fiction that address recent political events, asking how the nineteenth-century tradition of the country and the city can help us to understand and navigate the difficult terrain of culture and politics today.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 126H:
Passion, Purity, Politics: Fanaticism and British Literature, 1790-1890
A fanatic, Winston Churchill once declared, is ¿someone who can¿t change his mind and won¿t change the subject.¿ Unrelenting, irrational, and unwilling or unable to change, the fanatic may seem to embody everything that is wrong with politics and culture today. In this class, we will delve into the complex literary and political history of this deceptively simple figure, tracing the evolution of the fanatic in British culture from the aftermath of the French Revolution through the fin de siècle. We will consider fanaticism¿s place in the contest of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces, in the Victorian ¿crisis of faith,¿ in debates over the rights of women, and in the imperialist project and its ideological justifications. Focusing on the ways novelists have used literary character to explore different aspects of fanaticism, we will explore the place of conviction, transcendence, and the will in the ordinary, everyday world of the realist novel. The course will conclude with a meditation on the relevance of the concept of the fanatic to our own ¿post-secular¿ historical moment.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 129A:
Body Text (FEMGEN 129A)
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the BodynThis course asks when and where flesh becomes text. Through an eclectic mix of short stories, novels, film, nonfiction, and critical theory, we will think through how text becomes a metaphor for, substitute for, and/or extension of the body. What exactly do we talk about when we talk about The Body How are bodies written into and out of existence? Topics will include the virtual body, the eating-disordered body, the choreographed body, the medicalized trans body, and the black body in the carceral state. Throughout the course, we will draw out the theoretical in the literary and the literary in the theoretical, and will pay special attention to the relationship between embodied practice and (traditionally) disembodied thought.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 137B:
We see into the life of things: Forms of Romanticism
This course will offer a survey of ten major Romantic writers who published between the 1780s and 1820s, and of their innovations in four key genres: poetry, life-writing (including both travel-writing and autobiography), essays, and the novel. These texts variously appeared as strange, absurd, trivial, alarming and even revolutionary to their first readers, and this course will seek to recapture the artistic, imaginative, social, political and philosophical ferment which inspired the Romantics and which they hoped would reanimate and refocus their contemporaries at a time of remarkable socio-political change.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 138E:
The Gothic in Literature and Culture (COMPLIT 118)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 143F:
The Rise of the Food Memoir: 20th and 21st Century Perspectives
Marcel Proust eats a madeleine and remembers things past; M.F.K. Fisher evokes her childhood with the illicit taste of street tar; Bich Minh Nguyen recalls a red canister of Pringles in a cold Michigan house. What is it about food that lends itself so readily to the genre of the memoir? Beginning in the early 20th century and ending in the past decade, this course traces the development of the food memoir, its authors ranging from modernists to chef celebrities. As we read works by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Madhur Jaffrey, Laura Esquivel, and Gabrielle Hamilton, we will consider issues of gender, race, and nationality, understanding the food memoir as situated somewhere at the intersection of ethnography and autobiography.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
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 144F:
Female Modernism: Women Writers in Paris Between the Wars (FEMGEN 144F)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 145G:
US Fiction 1945 to 2000
Major works of US fiction since World War II, in social, historical, and aesthetic perspective. Ellison, Bellow, O'Connor, Pynchon, Reed, Morrison, Robinson, DeLillo, Gaitskill.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 145J:
The Jewish-American Novel: Diaspora, Privilege, Anxiety, Comedy (AMSTUD 145J, JEWISHST 155J)
Jews are sometimes referred to as 'the people of the book.' Would Portnoy's Complaint count as a book that constitutes Jewish-American peoplehood? What about Fear of Flying? This seminar introduces students to influential Jewish-American novels (and some short stories and film) from the late nineteenth century to the present day. These works return time and again to questions of diaspora, race, queer social belonging, and the duty to a Jewish past, mythical or real. Through close readings of short stories and novels coupled with secondary readings about Jewish-American history and culture, we will explore how American Jewishness is constructed differently in changing historical climates. What makes a text Jewish? What do we mean by Jewish humor and Jewish seriousness? How do Jewish formulations of gender and power respond to Jews' entrance into the white American mainstream? As we read, we'll think through and elaborate on models of ethnicity, privilege, sexuality, and American pluralism. Authors include Cahan, Yezierska, Singer, Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, Mailer, Jong, and Englander.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 146S:
Secret Lives of the Short Story
An exploration of the Short Story's evolution and variety of voices from its emergence in the 19th century to the present day. Weekly themes include the Detective Story, Immigration, Failure, Science Fiction, and Adolescence. We'll read a range of mostly American writers Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Sola Kim with an eye to uncovering the historical, cultural, and stylistic secrets of the Short Story, from both a literary criticism and a creative writing viewpoint.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 150D:
Women Poets (FEMGEN 150D)
The development of women's poetry from the 17th to the 20th century. How these poets challenge and enhance the canon, amending and expanding ideas of tone, voice and craft, while revising societal expectations of the poet's identity. Poets include Katharine Philips, Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 154E:
Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
Plays, poems, short stories, and novels. Writers include James Joyce, William Yeats, Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien,William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Samuel Beckett. How the writer can sustain imaginative freedom and literary experiment in the face of a turbulent history.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 156T:
Analysis Interminable: Psychoanalysis and Literature
From symptomatic reading to self-help, we continue to be inundated by psychoanalytic metaphors and methods, even as we disavow many of the assumptions and conclusions for which psychoanalysis is notorious. This course couples an elementary grounding in the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung, Kristeva, Winnicott, and Lacan with recuperations, critiques, and parodies of psychoanalysis in literature and literary criticism. Attending to the political landscapes that sustained, popularized, and/or debunked the field, we will begin to make sense of our troubled relationship to our psychoanalytic past. What happens when we read psychoanalytic theory as literature? How have psychoanalytic approaches to interpretation informed our norms of close reading, and where does psychoanalysis fit into contemporary literary and cultural criticism? Must we kill the father?
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 157H:
Creative Writing & Science: The Artful Interpreter (BIOHOPK 157H, BIOHOPK 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 begins with a field trip to Hopkins Marine Station where Stanford labs buzz with activity alongside barking seals and crashing waves. The trip 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...¿ Back on campus 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. **This course takes place on main campus and is open to all students. nNOTE: Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 159A:
Literature that Changed the World (AFRICAAM 159A, CSRE 159I)
How does literary art get involved in politics? What is the border between propaganda and art? This class examines moments when writers seem suddenly not only to represent politically charged topics and themes, but to have a part in bringing about political change. We¿ll look at case studies from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the American Civil Rights struggle, 19th century Russia, and more.
Terms: Aut
| 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.nEnglish majors must take this class for 5 units.
Terms: 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.nEnglish majors must take this class for 5 units.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 162W:
Writing Intensive Seminar in English (WISE)
In these highly regarded, small-group seminars, students explore unique topics in English language literature, reading select primary texts alongside exemplary critical works and/or other cultural artifacts, while also honing their research and writing skills through series of assignments that culminate in a substantial original research essay. Classes are capped at 8, allowing for individualized attention and rich feedback. 2019-2020 course topics include: African American author-critics; Asian encounters in American literature; queer drama of the AIDS crisis; Elizabeth Bishop and 20th century poetry; Shakespeare and Marx; dialogue and narrative theory; the politics of ¿bad reading¿; and protest literature. Click ¿Schedule¿ below to see individual course titles (in Notes). For fuller descriptions, go to https://english.stanford.edu/writing-intensive-seminars-english-wise. Enrollment is by permission. English majors must take at least one WISE to fulfill WIM. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting (contact vbeebe@stanford.edu).
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 163D:
Shakespeare: The Ethical Challenge (TAPS 163D)
Was the eighteenth century right in proclaiming Shakespeare to be the greatest moral philosopher? What are the ethical challenges Shakespeare's major plays still pose for us? Can we divorce ethical decisions from the contingencies of experience? We will ask a series of normative ethical questions (to do with pleasure, power, old age, self-sacrifice, and truth telling) and attempt to answer them in relation to the dramatic situation of Shakespeare's characters on the one hand and our own cultural situation on the other. The ethical challenge of Shakespearean drama will be set against selected readings in ethical theory.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-EthicReas, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
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: Aut, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 170D:
The Oral and Textual Beowulf
Was the Old English poem Beowulf intended to be read or heard? Was it primarily a literary text to be fastidiously poured over by theologically minded monks or was it a rousing tale for bards to declaim at courtly feasts, inflaming the passions of noble warriors swigging mead and chewing meat? Nobody knows. And yet this question lay at the heart of scholarly study of the poem for most of the 20th century because a definitive answer could dramatically change how we understand the poem. This course takes for granted the most important consensus to precipitate from these 20th century studies and debates: that the literary artifact which survives today can be nothing other than what it is¿that is, a poem written in a manuscript dating from about the year 1000 AD¿but also that this written poem was undoubtedly composed using formal techniques that must have originally been the tools of spontaneous oral versification. This existential hybridity will lead us into discussions of the poem¿s other various dualities which are inextricable from the question of its composition. Is the poem essentially Christian with pagan elements or essentially secular with Christian elements? Does it have a heroic or anti-heroic moral? Are its many frame narratives essential to the exposition of its themes or secondary to a consideration of the basic plot? In the pursuit of answers to these questions and more we will immerse ourselves in Beowulf by reading it in the original Old English, performing the poem in oral recitation, and studying the manuscript via online facsimile.nPrerequisite: Introduction to Old English Language and Literature. Taken together with its prerequisite, this course satisfies the undergraduate foreign language requirement.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 172D:
Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE 196C, PSYCH 155, SOC 146, TAPS 165)
How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows. Includes an optional Haas Center for Public Service certified Community Engaged Learning section. In accordance with Stanford virtual learning policies implemented for the Spring Quarter, all community engagement activities for this section will be conducted virtually. Please sign up for section 2 #33285 with Kendra, A. if you are interested in participating in virtual community engagement.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 182E:
Photography in Fiction
Since its invention in the early 19th century, photography has found countless documentary and artistic applications. As an art form, it is not only a medium of its own, but one which has entered into fascinating dialogue with other media, from film to dance. Perhaps nowhere has photography been put to such intriguing multimedia use as in fiction. Since the early 20thcentury, authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf, German novelist W.G. Sebald, and the contemporary Sri-Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, have deployed photographs throughout their texts. In this course, we will look at this literary tradition, exploring the way that text and image enter into a complex dance, at times enhancing narrative, at times troubling it. What can we make of these strange and wonderful hybrids? What place do images have in traditional narratives? What are the ethics of such work in an age in which the technological distinction between truth and fiction is becoming ever more blurred? As we read (and look), we will find ourselves not only drawn into the narratives themselves, but sent beyond them, into questions of history, gender, trauma, and memory.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-AQR
ENGLISH 187B:
Introduction to Queer Theory (FEMGEN 187B)
This seminar offers a foundation in the interdisciplinary and dynamic field of queer theory, from its poststructuralist underpinnings to its contemporary debates. We will consider the historical and intellectual forces that led to the codification of queer theory as a distinct field and elaborate on the frameworks that queer thinkers have offered for articulating sex, gender, and embodiment, together with the pleasures and disciplines associated therewith. The class will situate academic interventions in LGBTQIA+ history and will consider contemporary applications of theory in pop culture, health, science, education, and politics. How do queer theorists do and undo identity, knowledge, and power? What do theorists mean by the word queer? What do queers mean by the word theory? As we read and unpack the citational heavy-hitters, including Wittig, Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Cohen, Muñoz, Berlant, and Stryker, students will develop a theoretical framework for producing their own queer cultural critique.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
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 in popularity 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 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. The course will include visits (or virtual drop-ins) from some central figures in this story, be they essayists, critics or editors.nWe will investigate questions like: 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?nWhat 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?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 187G:
Queer Lives: LGBT Autobiographies Past and Present
The course will examine LGBT autobiographical writing from roughly 1900 to the present. The focus will be on how Gay and Lesbian writers have adapted to longstanding cultural disapproval and the stigmatizing, often bitter constraints of the "Closet." We will also examine what happens to the memoir form when social taboos against homosexuality (and/or transgenderism) come to be relaxed or overturned--as has been the case in many western societies in the new millennium.
Terms: Win
| Units: 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 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.
Terms: Win
| 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. 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 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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| 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 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
Terms: Win
| 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 Fiction Writer. Prerequisite: 90 or 91
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
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: Spr
| 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: Aut, Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| 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, Spr
| 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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
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.
Terms: Spr
| 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: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 194:
Individual Research
See section above on Undergraduate Programs, Opportunities for Advanced Work, Individual Research.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
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: Aut, 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);
Antopol, M. (PI);
Boland, E. (PI);
Brewer, W. (PI);
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Clark, H. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Gluck, L. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greif, M. (PI);
Hofmann, R. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kantor, R. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Labowskie, M. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Michas-Martin, S. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Owens, T. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Perham, B. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Phillips, P. (PI);
Porter, E. (PI);
Pufahl, S. (PI);
Quayson, A. (PI);
Ross, M. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schloesser Tarano, N. (PI);
Sears, M. (PI);
Shanahan, C. (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);
Whitmore, R. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI);
Yu, E. (PI);
Evans, J. (GP);
Potemski, A. (GP)
ENGLISH 199:
Senior Independent Essay
Open, with department approval, to seniors majoring in non-Honors English who wish to work throughout the year on a 10,000 word critical or scholarly essay. Applicants submit a sample of their expository prose, proposed topic, and bibliography to the Director of Undergraduate Studies before preregistration in May of the junior year. Each student accepted is responsible for finding a department faculty adviser. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 201:
The Bible and Literature
Differences in translations of the Bible into English. Recognizing and interpreting biblical allusion in texts from the medieval to modern periods. Readings from the Bible and from British, Canadian, American, and African American, and African literature in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 205:
William Wordsworth and the Shape of Romantic Experience
How did William Wordsworth think differently in different verse forms? This series of seminars will explore the particular kinds of imaginative, philosophical and political experience which Wordsworth made available in blank verse, ballads, sonnets and odes, situating his original expressiveness in the context of other examples of Romantic poetry. We will also consider the relationship between a selection of Wordsworth¿s prose writings and his poetic practice to see how his theoretical thinking ramified in his verse craft and how his broader intellectual ideas were in turn modelled on his poetics.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 206:
Dante and the Romantics (ITALLIT 206)
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 208:
Literature of Disease
This course will consider representations of disease from antiquity through the present-day, ranging from depictions of Biblical plagues, the Black Death, and Renaissance "pestilence," up through the cholera outbreaks of Victorian London, the global influenza of 1918, and the ongoing AIDS pandemic. In addition to reading literary works, we will dive into the archives to consider non-literary traces of disease, from "bills of mortality" to quack remedies, paintings, sermons, letters, diaries, government ordinances, and early medical texts.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 215H:
Shakespeare and the History Play
A close study of Shakespeare's English history plays and their influence on the romantic history plays of Schiller, Victor Hugo, and others.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 222:
Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf
Terms: Spr
| 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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
ENGLISH 227:
Melville's Moby-Dick
A slow and careful reading of Herman Melville's 1850 masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. In the process, we will unfold the novel's nineteenth-century literary-historical context as well as the world of Melville's own literary, religious, philosophical, technological, commercial, and scientific citations and allusions. We will seek to understand the multiple significances of Melville's experiments with the novelistic genre and their relationship with his building out the meaning of Americanness. In the second half of the quarter, we will focus on a selection of major mid-twentieth-century through contemporary critical, literary-theoretical, and political-theoretical readings of Moby-Dick.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 237:
Before Novels
What is at stake when we identify ancient, medieval, or early modern works as proto-novelistic, especially when such texts encompass the wondrous, the mystical, the factual, and/or didactic? What do the ¿prosaic¿ dimensions of prose fiction disclose about our conceptions or history, truth, or reality? Readings for this course may include (in English translation where applicable) Lucian, A True History; Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe; Cervantes, Don Quixote; Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller; Hooke, Micrographia; Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year; Austen, Persuasion.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 290:
Advanced Fiction Writing
Workshop critique of original short stories or novel. Prerequisites: manuscript, consent of instructor, and 190-level fiction workshop. nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 292:
Advanced Poetry Writing
Focus is on generation and discussion of student poems, and seeking published models for the work.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 293:
Literary Translation (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: 4
ENGLISH 300:
Medieval Methodologies (DLCL 300, MUSIC 300C)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-3
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: 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)
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, Sum
| 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 325:
Dickens and Eliot
Major novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, with a focus on our readerly and critical engagement with this basic category (¿major novel¿). Why such long narratives, such complicated plots, such multifarious character-systems? Why the strange mixture of realism and aesthetic eccentricity? How do we experience and understand the conspicuous scale, density, energy, or excess of such novels as Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch? The focus of the seminar will be reading these challenging, provoking, seductive texts; on the peculiar reading experiences produced by the nineteenth-century novel; and the history of critical response to this experience.
Terms: Win
| Units: 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. May be repeated for credit. In this year¿s installment, we focus on how artistic kinds or genres help set the terms on which individual works are experienced, understood, and valued, with special attention to lyric poetry and music.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2-4
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 20 units total)
ENGLISH 334B:
Concepts of Modernity II: Culture, Aesthetics, and Society in the Age of Globalization (COMPLIT 334B, MTL 334B)
Emphasis on world-system theory, theories of coloniality and power, and aesthetic modernity/postmodernity in their relation to culture broadly understood.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 352:
Postcolonial Tragedy
This course will survey debates on literary tragedy from a postcolonial perspective. Theories of tragedy from Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, the German Idealists and various others will be explored for viewpoints on tragedy that will in their turn be tested against a number of literary texts from the postcolonial literary tradition. Works by the Greeks, Shakespeare, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, and Tayeb Salih will be explored for a working definition of postcolonial tragedy.nPlease note that knowledge of Shakespearean tragedy will be taken for granted in this class If you are not already acquainted with Shakespeare you are encouraged to familiarise yourself with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello before taking the class. Frequent references will be made in class to these and other plays. Familiarity with Greek tragedy will also be useful during the first weeks of the course. Attention will be paid especially to Sophocles¿ Oedipus Rex and Philoctetes, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Euripides¿s Medea.Any kind of familiarity with the Greeks is better than none at all, so please be sure to be at the very least acquainted with their central characters and plotlines.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-4
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 384E:
Quantitative Models and Literary Form: Advanced Methods in Digital Humanities
This course will explore three methods of quantitative text analysis: topic modeling, word embedding, and named entity recognition. In each case, we learn how the method works, what humanities-based questions it can (or can¿t) answer, and how to interpret its results. Combining hands-on experimentation, with readings of humanities-based uses of each method, students will learn to integrate these techniques into their research and design analyses that can fully leverage the potential of each method. No previous technical experience is required.
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: ;
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Ngai, S. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 395:
Ad Hoc Graduate Seminar
Three or more graduate students who wish in the following quarter to study a subject or an area not covered by regular courses and seminars may plan an informal seminar and approach a member of the department to supervise it.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
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);
Bender, J. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fields, K. (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);
Lupic, I. (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 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: 10
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);
Bender, J. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fields, K. (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);
Lupic, I. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Owens, T. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Phelan, P. (PI);
Quayson, A. (PI);
Rasberry, V. (PI);
Richardson, J. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Treharne, E. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (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: 2
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 399:
Thesis
For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisers required.
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);
Bender, J. (PI);
Bronstein, M. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greif, M. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kantor, R. (PI);
Lupic, I. (PI);
McGurl, M. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Owens, T. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Phelan, 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)
