61 - 70 of 276 results for: ENGLISH

While Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. We will read four short novels - Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - to address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished."

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.

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 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.The course will meet M/W 5-7 PM with optional Friday studio time. The first meeting is Monday, April 15.

In this course, we will read a wide cross-section of British and American women writers who turned to fiction and poetry to examine, and to survive, their times: Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Una Marson. You will learn how to pay close attention to the often radically new ways these writers bent language to their purposes to express complex emotions and vexed political realities; in your own essay writing, you will learn how to write clearly and persuasively about small units of text and to craft longer critical analyses attentive to language, history, and culture. Always, students will be encouraged to draw connections between then and now, to ponder what has changed, and what remains to be changed, in our own turbulent times.

Where are the African female writers of the twentieth century and the present day? This Introductory Seminar addresses the critical problem of the marginalization of black female authors within established canons of modern African literature. We will explore, analyse and interrogate the reasons why, and the ways in which, women-authored bodies of work from this period continue to be lost, misplaced, forgotten, and ignored by a male-dominated and largely European/white publishing industry in the context of colonialism, apartheid and globalization. nnYou will be introduced to key twentieth-century and more contemporary female authors from Africa, some of them published but many more unpublished or out-of-print. The class will look at the challenges these female authors faced in publishing, including how they navigated a hostile publishing industry and a lack of funding and intellectual support for black writers, especially female writers. nnWe will also examine the strategies these writers used to mitigate their apparent marginality, including looking at how women self-published, how they used newspapers as publication venues, how they have increasingly turned to digital platforms, and how many sought international publishing networks outside of the African continent. As one of the primary assessments for the seminar, you will be asked to conceptualize and design an in-depth and imaginative pitch for a new publishing platform that specializes in African female authors. nnYou will also have the opportunity for in-depth engagement (both in class and in one-on-one mentor sessions) with a range of leading pioneers in the field of publishing and literature in Africa. Figures like Ainehi Edoro (founder of Brittle Paper) and Zukiswa Wanner (prize-winning author of The Madams and Men of the South), amongst others, will be guests to our Zoom classroom. One of our industry specialists will meet with you to offer detailed feedback on your proposal for your imagined publishing platform. nnYou can expect a roughly 50/50 division between synchronous and asynchronous learning, as well as plenty of opportunity to collaborate with peers in smaller settings.

Austen's finely wrought novels were unlike any previous fiction, offering an intensely realized example of literary originality. This class focuses on Austen's major writing, all published in a remarkable ten year period. These novels - including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion - have had a profound impact on the development and understanding of the novel as an art form. We'll take the measure of Austen's inventiveness and her subtle, engrossing experiments in narrative voice, fictional character, representation and literary form. Our two goals will be to closely engage each novel (looking at the major interpretative and aesthetic questions that are generated) and to track the rich dialogue that takes place between her different texts when they are read together.

What's `culture'? There is no such thing as `British culture' as a coherent singular phenomenon, but `culture' can be a useful lens to think about a place, its entanglement with the past and the rest of the world. In this class we can understand how the ideas and social relations that constitute the common-sense fiction of British culture and the very notions of `Britishness', `Englishness', etc. came about historically and are sustained in contemporary contexts. As well as learn how to use `culture' as a heuristic-critical tool to make sense of a particular place's entanglement in history, politics, and cultural production.

Is there a difference between being moral and being good? Does it matter? Does knowing the difference matter at all to how a person should conduct him or herself in close relationships, in social groups, in professional life, in politics? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. This class will explore human moral psychology: the intuitions we have about right and wrong, fair and unfair, harm, justice, loyalty, authority, sanctity, freedom and oppression. We will then relate these intuitions to systematic ethical theories of right and wrong. We will do so by immersing ourselves in a somewhat surprising source¿the greatest hits of Mafia movies from Little Caesar to The Sopranos. We will also consider recent findings in experimental moral psychology.