printer friendly pageENGLISH 175: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Embark on an engaging journey through medieval literature with Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," along with the works of Marie de France and Boethius. This course offers a vibrant exploration of storytelling, featuring interactive discussions, multimedia resources, and creative projects. Discover the rich tapestry of medieval thought, culture, and philosophy through a diverse range of texts. Dive into the world of knights, love, betrayal, and philosophical quests, making connections to contemporary issues. Ideal for anyone interested in the roots of modern literature and storytelling and the fascinating world of medieval society.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Vermeule, B. (PI)
ENGLISH 177: Contemporary Novel in U.S. Perspective (AMSTUD 177)
This course investigates a selection of novels from 2001 to the present, either authored in the United States or strongly and meaningfully received here by critics and gatekeepers. In the absence of a fixed academic canon or acknowledged tradition of exemplary works, this course includes evaluation as one of its central enterprises. Students help to make arguments for which works matter and why. Students consider topics including the demotion of the novel to a minor art form, competition from the image, transformations of celebrity culture (in literature and outside it), relevance or irrelevance of the digital age, aftermaths of the modernist and postmodernist project, eccentricity and marginality, race and gender politics in putatively post-feminist, post-racial,and post-political vantage, and problems of meaning in rich societies oriented to risk, probability, economization, health, consumption, comfort, and recognition or representation (rather than action or event). Novels and short stories may be supplemented by philosophical and sociological visions of the contemporary.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Greif, M. (PI)
ENGLISH 177B: Contemporary American Short Stories (AMSTUD 177B)
An exploration of the power and diversity of the American short story ranging from the 1970s to the present day. By examining short stories historically, critically, and above all as art objects, students will learn how to read, interpret, critique, and enjoy short stories as social, political, and humanist documents. Students will learn techniques to craft their own short stories and their own critical essays in a course that combines creative practice and the art of critical appreciation.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors:
Jones, G. (PI)
;
Trahan, J. (PI)
ENGLISH 180: Public Service and Social Impact: Pathways to Purposeful Careers (CSRE 190A, INTNLREL 74, POLISCI 74B, PUBLPOL 75B, SOC 190A, SYMSYS 193, URBANST 190A)
How do I translate my interests and skills into a career in public service and social impact? This course will introduce you to a wide range of roles that help shape public policy and civic life, including government, education, nonprofits, social enterprises, and arts/media. It can be taken for one or two units. For one unit, you participate in a weekly, interactive speaker series designed to give you a sense for what different public service careers are like. Each week, guests describe their organizations and roles, highlight key intellectual issues and policy challenges, discuss their career paths, and describe skills crucial for the job. For a second unit, you participate in a hands-on weekly session designed to help you translate this knowledge into action. You will identify roles and organizations that might be a good match for you, build your network through informational interviewing, receive career coaching, and acquire the tools you need to launch your job or internship searc
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How do I translate my interests and skills into a career in public service and social impact? This course will introduce you to a wide range of roles that help shape public policy and civic life, including government, education, nonprofits, social enterprises, and arts/media. It can be taken for one or two units. For one unit, you participate in a weekly, interactive speaker series designed to give you a sense for what different public service careers are like. Each week, guests describe their organizations and roles, highlight key intellectual issues and policy challenges, discuss their career paths, and describe skills crucial for the job. For a second unit, you participate in a hands-on weekly session designed to help you translate this knowledge into action. You will identify roles and organizations that might be a good match for you, build your network through informational interviewing, receive career coaching, and acquire the tools you need to launch your job or internship search. This course is intended for all students and all majors. Course content will be relevant to students soon entering the job market as well as those facing choices about courses of study and internships. Class sessions will be 60 minutes. This course is co-sponsored by the Haas Center for Public Service, the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Stanford in Government. Students taking the course for one unit (Tuesday lecture) must enroll in the -01 course option, and students taking the course for two units (Tuesday lecture and Thursday seminar) must enroll in the -02 course option. IR approved.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
Instructors:
Litvak, L. (PI)
;
Weisler, T. (PI)
ENGLISH 180A: Velocity and Suspension: The Sense of Time in Early Modern Writing
'A book that never ends, an ongoing book to tell you what is true.' Thus one literary critic describes the strangest of literary innovations from the late seventeenth century: the periodical form. Between 1641-1700, periodicals made up fully one-fourth of printed titles. Authors more often recognized as practitioners of other forms (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Frederick Douglass) also headed up their own journals as editors. This course, which prioritizes breadth of exposure, will also consider the temporal rhythms that a literary form like the periodical introduces and alters. By situating journalistic time within a range of calendrical regimes from the medieval period onward (the seasonal, monastic, public, scientific and yes, academic), students should find resources anew to guide their own practices of recurrent writing.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Yu, E. (PI)
ENGLISH 184E: Literary Text Mining
This course will train students in applied methods for computationally analyzing texts for humanities research. The skills students will gain will include basic programming for textual analysis, applied statistical evaluation of results and the ability to present these results within a formal research paper or presentation. Students in the course will also learn the prerequisite steps of such an analysis including corpus selection and cleaning, metadata collection, and selecting and creating an appropriate visualization for the results. This class is enrollment by permission only. To request a spot in the class, please fill out the survey:
https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6PrXGyFeo7g5eNU
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-AQR
Instructors:
Sherman, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 184F: Literary Text Mining 2: Studies in Cultural Analytics
In this course, students will learn how to apply quantitative and computational methods for analyzing text to questions that are of significance to Literary Studies, and the humanities more broadly. Beginning with a series of readings and discussions on the theoretical implications of using quantitative methods for literary analysis, we will move to in-depth instruction in more advanced methods for computational text analysis, including topic models, word embeddings, and large language models. Students will not only become familiar with training and querying these models, but, more importantly, will gain hands-on experience in how to build these analytical techniques into humanities-based research.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-AQR, WAY-FR
Instructors:
Algee-Hewitt, M. (PI)
;
Oh, U. (TA)
ENGLISH 185B: 'In her this brutal monster': Fiction of Mental Illness (FEMGEN 185B)
'In her this brutal monster': Literature of Mental Illness. How have literary traditions of madness informed modern fiction's portrayals of the human mind, particularly in the context of rapidly shifting cultural frameworks about the origins and manifestations of mental illness? What are the repercussions of new forms, trends and genres for parsing (or blurring) the line between condition and personhood? Using the novels of Akwaeke Emezi, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Leslie Marmon Silko to guide our inquiries, we'll consider inherited and new metaphors of madness in light of emerging theoretical interpretations of disability, identity, gender and trauma.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Howse, R. (PI)
ENGLISH 186B: The American Underground: Crime and the Criminal in American Literature
The literary representation of crime and the criminal from postrevolutionary through contemporary American literature. Topics will include the enigma of the criminal personality; varieties of crime, from those underwritten by religious or ethical principle to those produced by the deformations of bias; the impact on narrative form of the challenge of narrating crime; and the significance attributed to gratuitous crime in the American cultural context.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ENGLISH 187C: The Evolution of the Feminist First-Person Essay, 2000-present (FEMGEN 187C)
The internet age has coincided with the rise of new and reinvented modes of nonfiction writing by women online. The feminist first-person essay (what simply goes by ¿personal essay¿ in the business) has transformed internet writing formally, politically, and economically. The explosion innpopularity and shareability of this nonfiction subgenre has generated a host of new media and catapulted a new coterie of women writers into prominence. Which authors have exerted the most influence upon this new subgenre, how does the emergence of the first-person essay by women signify a mainstreaming of feminist dialectic, and how has this emergence been received by both a popular readership and the media establishment?nThis discussion-based course will investigate how the growth of the feminist first-person essay has promoted new publications and modes of publication. It will trace the genesis of the online personal essay genre from public journals like LiveJournal, Blogspot, and Tumblr, via its c
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The internet age has coincided with the rise of new and reinvented modes of nonfiction writing by women online. The feminist first-person essay (what simply goes by ¿personal essay¿ in the business) has transformed internet writing formally, politically, and economically. The explosion innpopularity and shareability of this nonfiction subgenre has generated a host of new media and catapulted a new coterie of women writers into prominence. Which authors have exerted the most influence upon this new subgenre, how does the emergence of the first-person essay by women signify a mainstreaming of feminist dialectic, and how has this emergence been received by both a popular readership and the media establishment?nThis discussion-based course will investigate how the growth of the feminist first-person essay has promoted new publications and modes of publication. It will trace the genesis of the online personal essay genre from public journals like LiveJournal, Blogspot, and Tumblr, via its codification in online publications like The Toast, The Rumpus, Gawker, Jezebel, Guernica, The Hairpin, The Awl, and xoJane, to its eventual breakthrough into established newspapers, magazines, and traditionally published memoirs and essay collections.nWe will investigate questions like: How can the rendering of one individual's story benefit the political mandate of the collective? What is the first person¿s effect, and affect, in interspersing an author¿s personal experience, and what feminist potential does it contain? How does the myth of journalistic ¿objectivity¿ conflict with the presentation of the first person, and how has this objectivity myth descended from patriarchal tropes of legitimation? What do the terms ¿confessional¿ and ¿silence-breaking¿ connote? How has social media simultaneously empowered these new modes of public feminist dialogue and also exposed feminist public intellectuals to alarming levels of harassment and abuse? How successfully has the personal essay subgenre acted in de-centering hegemonic identity structures including whiteness, class privilege, and heterosexuality? What role has the feminist first-person essay played in the emergence of heavily digitized political movements including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo? What is ¿trauma porn¿, and how does it interface with the capitalistic structures of the first-person essay economy; what problems arise when capitalism and confessionalism intersect?
Last offered: Autumn 2022
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