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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.