Results for ENGLISH

Online workshop whose primary focus is to give students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing. Students will come out of the course strengthened in their ability to identify and pursue their own creative interests. For undergrads only.

When we look closely at a photograph or painting, a story emerges, but how do we begin to interpret the meaning of that story without narration or passing time? When we listen to music or watch a ballet, we have a sense of emotion and drama, but why? And how has the artist created such things for us?<br><br> These questions have great resonance for the fiction writer, who must generate from the most basic tool all the necessities of the short story: drama, character, setting, emotion, and lyricism. In order to write more affecting and beautiful stories, this course will ask us to explore beyond the literary, into the world of the visual and performing arts. We will pair short stories with paintings, films, songs, and performances. As we learn the many ways stories are told and experienced, we will bring these insights into our own work through prompted exercises, improv, games, collaboration, workshop, and revision. In addition to exercises, vignettes, and sketches, each student will complete a short story and have that story critiqued by both her peers and the instructor. Our primary aim in this class will be to make writing a daily practice that considers the work and value of art generally and in that way to take risks, succeed, reflect, revise, fail, and recover from failure.

Shakespeare's Hamlet exists in three early editions published in 1603, 1604-05, and 1623. Nearly all modern editions conflate the three into a single text that includes famous or important speeches into a fourth version that would have been unrecognizable to Shakespeare's audience. For instance, the to be or not to be speech is utterly different across the three versions. This course asks what we learn about Shakespeare's play and the culture in which it was written and performed by treating the three versions as distinct texts with their own histories, purposes, and perhaps even world-views. The procedure of the course will be to read the three versions closely and, more often as we move through them, to note their variants and speculate about how these differences might inform a wide-ranging interpretation of Shakespeare's world. A few ancillary readings in textual studies, theater history, and Renaissance culture will cast light on the central questions.

Recently, The New York Times and the National Geographic have hailed the "new face of America" as young, global, and hybrid. The NY Times gave this demographic a name: Generation E.A. (Ethnically Ambiguous). Our course examines the political and aesthetic implications of Generation E.A., and the hot new vogue for all things mixed. Galvanized by the 2000 census with its "mark one or more" (MOOM) racial option, dozens of organizations, websites, affinity and advocacy groups, modeling and casting agencies, television pilots, magazines, and journals--all focused on multi-racial/multi-cultural experiences--have emerged in the last few years. We will analyze representations of mixed race and multiculturalism in law, literature, history, art, performance, film, comedy, and popular culture. These cultural and legal events are changing the way we talk and think about race. Importantly, our seminar also broadens this discussion beyond race, exploring how crossings of the color-line so often intersect with other aspects of experience related to gender, religion, culture, or class. Field trips, films, communal lunches, and interactive assignments help us explore the current controversies over mixed-race identification and, more generally, the expressive and political possibilities for representing complex identities. Requirements include three two- to three-page analytical writing assignments, a presentation that can include an optional artistic or media component, and a final group-designed project. If you are a citizen of the 21st century, this class is for and about you.

Who doesn't love going to a play: sitting in the darkened theater, an anonymous member of the audience waiting to be entertained, charmed, and challenged? But how many of us know enough about the details of the plays, their interpretation, their production, and acting itself, to allow us to appreciate fully the theatrical experience? In this seminar, we will spend 13 days in Ashland, Oregon, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), where we will attend these plays: Shakespeare's Henry IV1, Henry IV2, Julius Caesar, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; the world premiere of Jiehae Park's Hannah and the Dread Gazebo; Universes' August Wilson's Poetry in UniSon; Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey; the world premiere of Randy Reinholz's Off the Rails; Disney's Beauty and the Beast, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice; and Shakespeare in Love, based on the screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. (To read more about these productions, go to www.osfashland.org). We will also spend time backstage, meeting with actors, designers, and artistic and administrative directors of OSF. Students will read the plays before the seminar begins. In Ashland, they will produce staged readings and design a final paper based on one of the productions. These reviews will be delivered to the group and turned in on Thursday, September 21.nnNote: This seminar will convene in Ashland on Monday, September 4, and will adjourn to Stanford on Sunday, September 17. Students must arrive in Ashland by 4:00 p.m. on September 4. Room and board in Ashland and transportation to Stanford will be provided and paid for by the program.

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).

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

(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.

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.

For more than a century, cars and cinema have occupied a romantic place in the American imagination, as vehicles that can take us someplace new, or engines for our fantasies of mobility, freedom and personal expression. Perhaps this is one reason why the road movie is one of the most enduring subgenres of twentieth-century film. In this class, we¿ll watch ten classic American travel films, one for each decade starting from Buster Keaton¿s silent Go West (1925) and arriving at Christopher Nolan¿s space epic Interstellar (2014). We thus begin on a train and end on a spaceship. In between we¿ll travel by car, bus, motorcycle and even on foot across America and beyond, in search of answers to the motivating questions for this course: what is the attraction of the open road, and how is the romance of its call embraced and challenged by the multiple genres of these films, the concerns of the decades in which they were produced, and the limits they impose on the idea of unrestricted travel, individual growth and independence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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