Results for ENGLISH

This colloquium is intended for undergraduates who are interested in the history and theory of the novel, and who would like to attend the Center for the Study of the Novel's (CSN) annual conference. Before the conference, students will meet with CSN's graduate student staff, to read and discuss a small number of key texts by participating scholars, whose presentations students will then attend. After the conference, the colloquium will meet again, to discuss both the readings and conference papers, and explore their broader implications for the study of the novel. Attendance at both meetings of the colloquium, and at least one panel at the conference, is required for course credit.

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.

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. May repeat for credit.

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.

Werewolves, dragons, cannibals, witches, sea monsters, faeries, moral monstrosity, madness, the uncanny and the grotesque the monstrous is frightening, fury-filled, unknowable, and seductive. Monsters inhabit the literary imagination and the historic landscape. Monsters live on the margins of society; they are culturally and ideologically fraught; they exhibit sexual, racial, religious, and physical difference. In this course, we shall examine the depiction and meaning of the monster in literature, manuscript images, and maps from England and Wales from about 650CE to 1650CE.

From the 14th to the 17th centuries, what are the relations between literature and history? How has our understanding of key works changed as historicism--or the approach that treats a period in its specificity--has changed? Discussion of how literature works as a force in culture, not only a reflection of other forces. Readings from Old English lyrics, Chaucer, the Gawain poet, More, Wyatt, Surrey, Lock, Sidney, Spenser, Ralegh, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton and Cavendish.

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.

Robin Hood the Outlaw; Grendel, the monster of the moors; medieval battle-sites; early roadways: the remnants of medieval villages visible through Google Earth and cyber-visualization: this course will explore what ancient English landscapes and landmarks reveal about culture, society, politics, nation and identity a thousand years ago. (Mandatory for participants in the Lost in the Myths of Time Bing Overseas Seminar)

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.

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.

(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.

This course will study four literary masterpieces in depth: John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667; 1674); Book 4 of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817); and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). All of these works are complex and will repay close study. But they also work their way into an ongoing literary conversation in the western world and in that sense serve as touchstones for later writers. We will consider each work not only for its own aesthetic accomplishment but also in sometimes passionate debate with its author's historical circumstances.

(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.

Survey of the major trends in literary history from 1850 to the present.

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 V, Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet; the world premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle's Mannahatta; Kate Hamill's Sense and Sensibility, based on Jane Austen's novel; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein¿s Oklahoma!; the world premiere of Idris Goodwin's The Way the Mountain Moved; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's Snow in Midsummer, based on the classical Chinese drama The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth by Guan Hanquing; and Lauren Gunderson's The Book of Will. (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 20.nnNote: This seminar will convene in Ashland on Monday, September 3, and will adjourn to Stanford on Sunday, September 16. Students must arrive in Ashland by 4:00 p.m. on September 3. Room and board in Ashland and transportation to Stanford will be provided and paid for by the program.

Fan fiction has been called one of the great unsung popular literary movements of the past fifty years. Long in existence but increasingly mainstream, the genre has emerged onto the 21st-century literary landscape as a cultural force to be reckoned with. This course will treat fan fiction as a legitimate genre of literature worthy of academic attention and analysis. We will examine both text and context, considering tropes and style of 'fanfic' as well as cultural impact and influence. Key themes of the course include intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and fanfic as a medium for narrative expansion and transgression.

(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.) Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, "Black Elk Speaks."

A study of performances (Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra etc) of songs by classic American composers (Porter, Rogers and Hart, Cohen).

For student research workshops in Ng House / Humanities House. Open to both residents and non-residents. May be repeated for credit.

Seminar with Writer in Residence John Markus (BA English '78); meets for seven sessions over three weeks in February. Students will work one on one and in small groups with this professional writer and Stanford alum. John has written everything from stand-up to critically-acclaimed network and cable television shows to independent films to, most recently, theatrical plays. This seminar is designed for students who would like to produce a piece of work in three weeks and/or to pursue a writing profession.

This short, intensive seminar features Humanities Scholar & Artist in Residence Clare Whistler (visiting from England April 12-27) 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. In five residence-based sessions around Gerhard Quad, students will learn to develop personal and professional practices such as finding and creating apprenticeships and internships, creating a Humanities "start up," and partnering with investors, foundations, fundraisers, patrons, and community. 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.

In this course, we explore the world of words: their creation, evolution, borrowing, change, and death. Words are the key to understanding the culture and ideas of a people, and by tracing the biographies of words we are able to discern how the world was, is, and might be perceived and described. We trace how words are formed, and how they change in pronunciation, spelling, meaning, and usage over time. How does a word get into the dictionary? What do words reveal about status, class, region, and race? How is the language of men and women critiqued differently within our society? How does slang evolve? How do languages become endangered or die, and what is lost when they do? We will visit the Facebook Content Strategy Team and learn more about the role words play in shaping our online experiences. Together, the class will collect Stanford language and redesign the digital dictionary of the future. Trigger Warning: Some of the subject matter of this course is sensitive and may cause offense. Please consider this prior to enrolling in the course.

Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? In this course, we approach issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st century U.S. We will examine issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation and racial prejudice in American society. Topics we will explore include the political and social formation of "race"; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of Census categories and the rise of the Multiracial Movement.

Since the publication of slave narratives in the eighteenth century, the genre of autobiography has occupied a unique position in the history of African American literary expression. By studying classic autobiographical narratives by black writers, this course will explore questions about racial inequality and democracy, the individual and society, and writing and freedom, among other topics.

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"?

Unbound from classical poetics, or from any strict adherence to the conventions of comedy, tragedy, and history, Shakespeare made¿and still makes¿the stage come to life. The course will focus on some of the more unsettling productions from the hand of the bard, among them Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale</I>.