131 - 140 of 166 results for: ENGLISH

The difference between reading and reading closely. Is close reading a specific method of literary criticism or theory, or does it describe a sensibility that can accompany any interpretation? Categories and frameworks for this ubiquitous, often undefined critical practice. Different, sometimes competing, traditions of close reading and recent critiques and alternatives. Texts could include Empson, Barthes, Auerbach, T. J. Clark, Adorno, Brooks, de Man, D. A. Miller, Helen Vendler.

Introduction to the critical skills required for working in the archives. Students will be taught the core methods for working with archival sources, and will be trained in the transcription, editing, interpretation, and publication of primary textual materials. Our textual materials will be generically varied and chronologically diverse, and we shall move from late medieval to contemporary holdings in Stanford University Library¿s Special Collections, in other archives at Stanford, and in local private holdings.

Performance theory through topics including: affect/trauma, embodiment, empathy, theatricality/performativity, specularity/visibility, liveness/disappearance, belonging/abjection, and utopias and dystopias. Readings from Schechner, Phelan, Austin, Butler, Conquergood, Roach, Schneider, Silverman, Caruth, Fanon, Moten, Anzaldúa, Agamben, Freud, and Lacan. May be repeated for credit.

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.

Varieties of literary irony from Plato through the present. Topics include: verbal, dramatic, situational, and romantic irony. Focus will be on questions about what irony is and why writers use it. How does irony go astray? What kinds of topics seem to require irony? How does irony work? Writers include Chaucer, Swift, Thomas Mann, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace.

This course will explore the illuminated world of William Blake poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist in the context of intellectual history, culture, and aesthetics. To study Blake is to witness the birth pangs of modernity and the pathos energy and agony of alternate, impossible histories that fell by the wayside. The task is multidisciplinary, and it is one that opens literary history into our contemporary moment. Blake challenges virtually every aspect of literary representation, from character to narrative structure, from poetic meter to typology and other features of print culture. He is historical in his situatedness (religious dissent, the chemical revolution, industrialization, commodification, and controversies about human and animal rights were all part of his milieu) but he is also radically present in his ongoing influence and relevance. The course will unpack Blake's iconography, ideology, mythology, and infernal method which made every illuminated book a unique work of art.

This course serves as the Core Seminar for the PhD Minor in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. It introduces students to a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy with literary and arts criticism. In this year's installment of the seminar, we will focus on issues about the nature of fiction, about the experience of appreciation and what it does for us, about the ethical consequences of imaginative fictions, and about different conceptions of the importance of the arts in life more broadly. The seminar is intended for graduate students. It is suitable for theoretically ambitious students of literature and the arts, philosophers with interests in value theory, aesthetics, and topics in language and mind, and other students with strong interest in the psychological importance of engagement with the arts. May be repeat for credit

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

The fate of lyric in nineteenth-century British Literature. An expansion of the traditional category of lyric to include both narrative and dramatic forms of poetry, yielding such hybrid forms as lyrical ballads and lyricized epic fragments, on the one hand, and monodrama, dramatic monologues, conversation poems, and Romantic closet drama, on the other. The transformation of the courtly form of the sonnet into vehicles of domesticated sentiment, and the emergence of sprung rhythm and symbolism by century¿s end.