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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.