Results for ENGLISH

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.

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. For undergrads only

From the 14th to the 17th centuries, what are the relations between literature and history? How has our understanding of key works changed as historicisms--or the approach that treats a period in its specificity--have changed? Discussion of how literature works as a force in culture, not only a reflection of other forces. Chaucer's General Prologue and Knight's Tale; More, Utopia; Wyatt and Sidney, poems; Lock, Meditation of a Penitent Sinner; Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book One; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Donne, Songs and Sonets and Holy Sonnets; Milton, Paradise Lost.

What is the secret of theatrical illusion? How does the theater move us to wonder, sympathetic identification, and reflection? How do the changing stories that theater tells reveal our values? We will ask these questions through a close examination--on the page and on the stage--of dramatic masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderón, and Mozart. We will attend a live performance of The Magic Flute. No prior knowledge of music is required.

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and  tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society's (and our society's) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, and what it means to be "American"?

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

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).

(Formerly 94A.) 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.

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.

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.

This course, centered on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is first and foremost a class about beginnings and endings. To put the problem in its general form, we will be wondering where a literary text begins, and what it means for it to end. Chaucer's Canterbury is constantly ending and beginning again, starting anew as the tale-telling game breaks down, is interrupted, and recommences. We will also think about the Canterbury Tales as open and closed in terms of their material existence. What do the Canterbury Tales tell us about how we open or close a medieval manuscript or a digital text?

What was English like before Shakespeare? Before Chaucer? In this class, you will learn to read Old English the ancestor of Modern English, spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons over a thousand years ago¿and in the process, you will begin to unravel the mysteries of the earliest English literature. These mysteries include riddles and other puzzles that have baffled readers for centuries, but they also include modern mysteries caused by damaged manuscripts and allusions to characters and texts now lost to the ages. We will encounter all of these enigmas (and many more) throughout the quarter as we read texts such as Widsith, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Wife¿s Lament, and The Husband¿s Message. For your final project, you will have the chance to interpret one of them and offer your own favorite solution.

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

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

This course delves into the bizarre annals of nineteenth-century madness -- the world of Ahab's "monomania," Edgar Allan Poe's "brain fever," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "hysteria". Placing these literary texts in the context of the historical development of psychiatry during the nineteenth century, we will find that madness often assumes different forms in men and women, white Americans and African-Americans, capitalists and laborers -- suggesting that social inequalities cannot be cleanly separated from biological dispositions in our understanding of insanity. Reading these fictions of madness will not only illuminate the fundamental tensions of American culture, but will give us a new perspective on the construction of mental illness in the contemporary United States.

Ten weeks, twenty-four poets, as follows: The Ache of the Modern: Hardy and Hopkins; The Making of Irish Modernism: W. B. Yeats; American Romanticism: Whitman and Dickinson; American Modernism: Frost and Stevens; Transatlantic Modernism: Eliot and Auden; Imagism: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D.; Sappho's Sisters: Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich; Poetry and Madness: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton; Harlem Renaissance and Poets of Color: Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott; The Indomitable Irishry: Heaney, Muldoon, Boland.

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

¿TV¿s Lost Weekends,¿ a recent headline calls them, referring to our modern habit of binge-watching television shows. Today¿s commentators debate the right way to watch TV and, as they do, they echo longstanding arguments about how to read books. This course juxtaposes contemporary television with novels from the last 150 years in order to explore different ways of experiencing longform narratives. Primary examples will most likely be Dickens¿s Bleak House, The Wire Season 1, Conrad¿s Lord Jim, and True Detective Season 1.

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

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

Small literature-based, writing-intensive seminars taught by advanced graduate students in the English Ph.D. program. The goal will be to produce a high-quality final research paper. Courses will be oriented around a single text or a small group of texts in conversation with a larger spectrum of scholarship and knowledge in literary criticism and theory, film, painting, or material culture. The small format will allow undergraduates to receive detailed commentary and one-on-one feedback on their writing. To review the full list of WISE seminars, please visit this link: https://english.stanford.edu/courses/2016-2017-english-162w.

Course will examine the intersecting genres of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Topics will include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.); the role of language in the development of the self; the relational nature of the self (vis-à-vis the family, "society," God); the cultural status of "individuality"; the concept of childhood; and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of family, religious and national history.

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.

This course studies many aspects of translating fiction into film, written media into visual and written. Topics include short story into feature film: Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, into Sarah Polly's Away from Her ; conventional police procedural into post-WWII Japanese hybrid of procedural and film noir: Ed McBain's King's Ransom into Kurosawa's High and Low which deals with changing standards of Japanese business, class issues, the effects of the American atomic bomb; classic southern gothic horror novel (Davis Grubb's Night of the Hunter) into Charles Laughton's American expressionist masterpiece; complete revision of Dorothy B. Hughes novel into Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (Humphrey Bogart); Philip K. Dick and the various interpretations of Blade Runner.

From Sophocles to Barfield, adoption has been at the center of Western literature. This course will explore adoption as both plot point as as symbolic structure for meaning-making in myth and fiction. While this course will not count as Creative Expression, final projects can be creative and/or scholarly.

May be taken twice for credit. Lottery. Priority to last quarter/year in school, majors in English with Creative Writing emphasis, and Creative Writing minors. Prerequisite: 90 or 91.

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

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

Continuation of 91. Workshop. The application of advanced storytelling techniques to fact-based personal narratives, emphasizing organic writing, discovering audience, and publication. Guest lecturers, collaborative writing, and publication of the final project in print, audio, or web formats. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.

May be taken twice. Lottery. Priority to last quarter/year in school, majors in English with Creative Writing emphasis, and Creative Writing minors. Prerequisite: 92.

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

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

In two quarters.

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

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.

This course will examine influential American poetry of the postwar period, taking as its starting point the poets included in Donald Allen¿s landmark anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. After a reading of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School poets found there, we will probe the limits of Allen¿s selection, considering figures proximate to the New Americans or influenced by them. Topics to be discussed will include the relationship between New American poetry and its modernist predecessors, the status of poetic form, and the connection between these literary movements and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

From Sophocles to Barfield, adoption has been at the center of Western literature. This course will explore adoption as both plot point as as symbolic structure for meaning-making in myth and fiction. While this course will not count as Creative Expression, final projects can be creative and/or scholarly.

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.

Coverage of the major Romantic poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats) in cultural, historical, and book-historical context.

Exploration of the formation of models of selfhood and subjectivity, both individual and corporate, in colonial through postrevolutionary America Readings encompass literary and non-literary expressive forms. Categories of selfhood and subjectivity drawn from political, religious, social, and metaphysical thought, including the concepts of sainthood and election; republican and democratic subjectivity; the now-competing, now-contiguous notions of inherent right and conscience; and the processes of conversion and secularization. Current theoretical attempts to frame the subject, predominantly the work of Foucault on the hermeneutics of subjectivity.

We will read all the major Woolf novels: The Voyage Out, Jacob¿s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and Between the Acts---with additional reading from her essays and letters. Considerable attention will be paid to Woolf's family history, the evolution of her pioneering literary style, her views on sexuality, women, and society, and her complex personal relationships with other members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group (Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington, Katherine Mansfield, et al.).

An introduction to modernism, focusing on the novel. Modernist studies has been eager to explore various axes of ¿expansion¿¿geographic (beyond Europe), temporal (beyond the early twentieth century), and cultural (across the divide between ¿high¿ and ¿low¿ realms of culture). The class will focus both on familiar modernist such as James, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; we¿ll also look at case studies of potential forms of expansion (temporal: James Baldwin; geographic: Mulk Raj Anand; and others); secondary sources will focus on recent developments that stretch the boundaries of the field of modernist studies.

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

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

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

Required for first-year graduate students in English. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.

Required for first-year Ph.D students in English, 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.

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

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.

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

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

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