101 - 110 of 276 results for: ENGLISH

Online workshop course in which students explore issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem.

This creative writing workshop will make use of Stanford's own Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection to explore the relationship between poetry and visual art. We'll read poets whose work incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, film, and ekphrasis, and will engage poetically with art on view at Stanford. Each student will produce a mixed media chapbook by the end of the quarter. Readings will include works by Claudia Rankine, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anne Carson, William Blake, Robin Coste Lewis, Maggie Nelson, Layli Long Soldier, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Etel Adnan. Note: First priority to undergrads. Students must attend the first class meeting to retain their roster spot.

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!

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.

Infectious diseases are too small to see and too large to fathom. Biologically, microscopic invaders, viruses even smaller than our cells, can travel across the planet and infect billions of humans. Socially, individual contacts have the potential to devastate families, fracture communities, and decimate whole civilizations. How can we comprehend, let alone make meaningful decisions about, complex multi-scale systems of people and pathogens?The main way we try to understand infectious diseases is putting them into other forms that straddle these scales, in short, representing them. To address the resulting representational problems, this course explores a range of scientific and cultural representations of disease. We will ask: What are the underlying assumptions and limits made in our attempts to describe a pathogen spreading through a population? How can board games, mathematical models, and oral histories show the randomness behind catastrophic outbreaks? Or, how might a network model illustrate the way HIV spreads among characters in a novel? How does the epidemiological case study rely on the same principles as tabloid stories about "superspreaders" like Typhoid Mary?The goal of the course is to understand and critique the ways infectious disease is represented, and especially to understand what and who is excluded in different modes of representation. This course is appropriate for students interested in public health, medicine, life writing, science writing, history of science, and media studies. In addition to scientific papers, course material will include plays, poems, board games, comics, novels, oral narratives, and newspaper articles.

The Middle Ages have a reputation for extraordinary violence, but why? In this course, we study the medieval literary record for answers, exploring the artistic, historical, and social conditions compelling these authors to write about war, murder, and other brutalities. How did Viking economy and religion converge to make raiding and slavery moral enterprises? How did antisemitic theology dehumanize Jews, exposing their bodies to real and symbolic violence and outlawry? Why were the first several centuries of English written poetry modeled on preliterate barbarian war chant? To answer these questions and others, we will survey texts from medieval English, Norse, French, and German literary traditions; by the end of this course, students will understand medieval relationships between literature, violence, and the imagination, and how medieval literature and its cultural lineage construct modern ideas about the upper limits of human ferocity. Texts in English or English translation; no knowledge of medieval languages required.

In this course, students read the medieval myths, legends, folklore, travelers' tales, and chronicles that give shape and character to what we now call "the Viking Age" (793-1066 CE). Through our readings of these texts, we will answer the following questions: who were the Vikings? What language did they speak? Who were their gods and what were they like? What stories did they tell, how did these shape their values, and what were their principles of literary art? What did other cultures think of them, and who is responsible for their reputation? Readings?originally in Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Arabic, and more?will be in modern English translation.

In this course, we will consider major landmarks of aesthetic reflection on the meanings of artworks for their audiences, each of which is a landmark of literature in its own right. Authors might include the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Schiller, Hazlitt, Nietzsche, Woolf, Sontag, Cavell, Irigaray.

Lecture/small group course exploring intersections of STEM, arts and humanities scholarship and practice that engages with, and generated by, exponential technologies. Our course explores the social ethical and artistic implications of artificial intelligence systems with an emphasis on aesthetics, civic society and racial justice, including scholarship on decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries.