printer friendly pageENGLISH 92: Reading and Writing Poetry
Prerequisite:
PWR 1. Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. May be repeated for credit.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors:
Brewer, W. (PI)
;
Michas-Martin, S. (PI)
;
Perham, B. (PI)
...
more instructors for ENGLISH 92 »
Instructors:
Brewer, W. (PI)
;
Michas-Martin, S. (PI)
;
Perham, B. (PI)
;
Ross, M. (PI)
;
Shanahan, C. (PI)
;
Sharif, S. (PI)
;
Shewmaker, M. (PI)
ENGLISH 92AP: Arab and Arab-American Poetry (CSRE 92D)
In this introductory course, students will write and read widely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. The course will focus primarily on the rich and varied tradition of Arab and Arab-American poets, with a special emphasis on contemporary poets exploring the intersections of cultural identity, nationhood, race, gender, and sexuality. The first half of the course will consist of close reading a selection of poems, while the second half of the course will consist of workshopping student writing. Through peer critique, students respond closely to the work of fellow writers in a supportive workshop. Writers at all levels of experience and comfort with poetry are welcome.nNOTE: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Shanahan, C. (PI)
ENGLISH 93Q: The American Road Trip
From Whitman to Kerouac, Alec Soth to Georgia O'Keeffe, the lure of travel has inspired many American artists to pack up their bags and hit the open road. In this course we will be exploring the art and literature of the great American road trip. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own personal projects, and considering a wide breadth of narrative approaches. Assignments will range from reading Cormac McCarthy's novel, 'The Road,' to listening to Bob Dylan's album, 'Highway 61 Revisited.' We will be looking at films like 'Badlands' and 'Thelma and Louise,' acquainting ourselves with contemporary photographers, going on a number of campus-wide field trips, and finishing the quarter with an actual road trip down the California coast. Anyone with a sense of adventure is welcome!
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors:
Carlson-Wee, K. (PI)
ENGLISH 94: Creative Writing Across Genres
For minors in creative writing. The forms and conventions of the contemporary short story and poem. How form, technique, and content combine to make stories and poems organic. Prerequisite: 90, 91, or 92.
Last offered: Spring 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 94Q: The Future is Feminine (FEMGEN 94Q)
Gender is one of the great social issues of our time. What does it mean to be female or feminine? How has femininity been defined, performed, punished, or celebrated? Writers are some of our most serious and eloquent investigators of these questions, and in this class we'll read many of our greatest writers on the subject of femininity, as embodied by both men and women, children and adults, protagonists and antagonists. From Virginia Woolf to Ernest Hemingway, from Beloved to Gone Girl (and even "RuPaul's Drag Race"), we'll ask how the feminine is rendered and contested. We'll do so in order to develop a history and a vocabulary of femininity so that we may, in this important time, write our own way in to the conversation. This is first and foremost a creative writing class, and our goals will be to consider in our own work the importance of the feminine across the entire spectrum of gender, sex, and identity. We will also study how we write about femininity, using other writers as models and inspiration. As we engage with these other writers, we will think broadly and bravely, and explore the expressive opportunities inherent in writing. We will explore our own creative practices through readings, prompted exercises, improv, games, collaboration, workshop, and revision, all with an eye toward writing the feminine future.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors:
Pufahl, S. (PI)
ENGLISH 101A: How to Read Beowulf
How much can we really know about something written a thousand or more years ago? In this class, we will work towards answering this question as we read the most famous piece of Old English literature. Our ultimate goal will be learning to read as medievalists, investigating what Beowulf's story, its characters, and its heroic ethos may have meant to its medieval audience's and what it means to us today. Whether you plan to research medieval topics in your undergraduate (or graduate) career, want to explore the medieval basis of modern fantasy and historical fiction, or just love a good epic tale, join us and learn to think, interpret, and research like a medievalist. This class can be taken as an Old English language course and/or an introduction to Old English literature in translation. All levels of experience are welcome!
Last offered: Spring 2018
ENGLISH 101B: Multi-species Fictions: Animals and 20th Century American Literature
What does it mean to be an animal? And what does it mean to be a person? Ideas about other species - how they think and feel, act and react - involve categories such as race, gender, class and ability in often-surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animal life and human identity in twentieth-century American fiction, from the advent of Darwinian thought to contemporary animal advocacy. Readings will include Jack London, Zora Neale Hurston, Linda Hogan, Ruth Ozeki, Philip K. Dick and Grant Morrison, as well selected texts from the growing field of critical animal theory. The course also offers an optional community engagement opportunity to work with Animal Assisted Happiness or another multi-species organization.
Last offered: Spring 2018
ENGLISH 103B: Introduction to Old English Language and Literature
Students will learn the language skills necessary to parse and translate the earliest literature written in the English language. The course will look at how Anglo-Saxon authors used the particularly rich qualities of their vernacular to craft texts that represent and reflect on war, a principal institution of their medieval society. Our discussion will consider how the conventions of genre and form, as well as contextual forces like religion, cultural tradition, and contemporary history, shaped their writing on the subject.
Last offered: Winter 2018
ENGLISH 104: The Art of the Book: Renaissance to Modernism
W.B. Yeats once sought inspiration in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart," a place where litter and scraps were recycled into the paper that held his poems. In this course, we will reconsider the literary text as a physical object, tracing how writers integrate its physical characteristics into their poetry and prose during eras of increasing mechanization. How do these texts ask us to ¿read¿ the printed page? When and why do we ignore it? How does literature engage our senses and call attention to itself? This course will include meetings in Stanford Special collections to examine original editions of our texts. Readings include works by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, William Blake, William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and Gertrude Stein.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Beckman, J. (PI)
ENGLISH 106: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in Fiction (AMSTUD 106A)
From self-driving cars to bots that alter democratic elections, artificial intelligence is growing increasingly powerful and prevalent in our everyday lives. Literature has long been speculating about the techno-utopia¿and catastrophe¿that A.I. could usher in. Indeed, literature itself presents us with a kind of A.I. in the many characters that speak and think in its pages. But how do we classify an intelligence as ¿artificial¿ or not? Is there a clear boundary that demarcates bodies from machines? What, if anything, separates the ¿genre¿ of technology from that of literature? What classifies literature as ¿science fiction,¿ ¿scientific,¿ ¿futuristic,¿ ¿psychological,¿ or ¿dystopian¿? And can technology or literature ever overcome the ultimate division between all intelligences¿the problem of other minds? This course consists in curated multi-genre combinations of literature, philosophy, film, and television that explore what makes someone¿or something¿a person in our world today. Special events will include celebrating the current bicentennial of Mary Shelley¿s Frankenstein (1818) in Stanford Special Collections; a possible visit to Stanford¿s A.I. Laboratory; and chatting with the ELIZA chatbot.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Tackett, J. (PI)
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