231 - 240 of 315 results for: ENGLISH

The course will focus on expatriate women writers - American and British - who lived and wrote in Paris between the wars. Among them: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Margaret Anderson, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks, Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, and Jean Rhys. A central theme will be Paris as a lure and inspiration for bohemian female modernists, and the various alternative and emancipatory literary communities they created.

In our era of anthropogenic climate change, the need for more effective methods for understanding the interaction and impact of humans with/on the oceans has never been more urgent. This innovative new course introduces students to the forefront of interdisciplinary work on ocean systems involving the humanities/science integration. This integration is the least explored among all the areas of interdisciplinary study of the oceans, which has much more prominently featured social science/policy/science issues. Our course will introduce methods for pursuing this timely integration under the guidance of Oceans Department Chair Fiorenza Micheli and English Department Professor Margaret Cohen. In the first 5 weeks of the course we will look at selections from influential case studies in such integration around shared archives of interest. Our examples include writer John Steinbeck and marine scientist Ed Rickett's co-authored Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), Stephen Palumbi and Carolybn Sotka's Death and Life of Monterey Bay and ongoing collaborations at Stanford. Students taking the course for 3 credits will attend one day of a workshop on Feb. 7, 2025 bringing leading figures in ocean humanities and ocean sciences to discuss paths forward. In Weeks 7-10, students will work in teams, ideally built of collaborators with differing types of area expertise, identifying a question of interest both to humanities and science researchers and exploring paths forward. This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units and a letter grade to be eligible for Ways credit.

Of all the components of prose fiction and the novel in particular, the most slippery is character. What kind of personhood is fictional personhood? What is a textual human? Do characters possess individuality or do they form networks or zones? Do these networks and zones extend beyond the boundary between fiction and reality to take in author and readers? If so, how? Are the categories by which we classify character - narrator, protagonist, antagonist, hero/heroine, etc. - adequate as descriptors of their function in a literary text? In this course, we will examine subgenres of the novel that focus on these questions, particularly the bildungsroman, autofiction, and novels in which a central character lacks interiority or self-awareness, and is therefore almost incapable of self-expression. How minimal can a character be? What happens when a first-person narrator, who is also a character, represents his or her altered consciousness? In such cases, who narrates? What resources does the novelist have to negotiate such formal contradictions? And what do we make of doubles, dybbucks, secret sharers, and other uncanny selves? Is character an infinite regression - fictions of fictions of persons? Authors may include Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Jane Bowles, Cormac McCarthy, J. M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Patrick Modiano, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk. Theorists may include M. M. Bakhtin, Ian Watt, Erich Auerbach, Dorrit Cohn, Maurice Blanchot, Franco Moretti, Catherine Gallagher, Alex Woloch.

This class will introduce students to various spatial theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Joseph Frank, Michel Foucault, etc. along with concepts such as spatial traversal, means of locomotion, and spatial morphologies through the novels and short stories of Black writers worldwide, including James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Walter Moseley, Richard Wright, Chinua Achebe, Ivan Vladislavic, Naguib Mahfouz, and others.

This class presents a survey of medieval German vernaculars and their documentation in manuscripts and on material objects. The languages include Gothic, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old English, and Old High German. Readings will include runic inscriptions, magic charms, proverbs and riddles, apocalyptic visions, heroic lays, and sermons and prayers. (This course must be taken for a letter grade and a minimum of 3 units to satisfy a Ways requirement.)Please note this course meets MW 1:30-2:50 and is taught by Professors Kathryn Starkey and Elaine Treharne.

Why are the thoughts, feelings, and actions of English poets a millennium ago still so important in modern and contemporary poetry? Early English literature has long had an extraordinary influence on later writers from John Milton to Elizabeth Elstob, William Morris, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Denise Levertov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maria Dahvana Headley. This course will ask what is so special about these creative connections across time. We'll closely examine English lyrical, devotional, heroic, and fantastic poetry from the tenth to the twelfth centuries to consider the themes, ideas, and emotion that motivated later poets to adopt, adapt, and echo their age-old predecessors. Students will learn?through hard work?how to translate and evaluate Early English (getting an excellent knowledge of English grammar, lexis, and form into the bargain) in order to produce their own inventive poetry in the vein of inspired Old English shapers of verse.

tba

How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might include Cook, Banks, Equiano, Ricketts, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Critical readings include Schmitt, Rediker and Linebaugh, Baucom, Best, Corbin, Auden, Sontag and Heller-Roazen. Films by Sekula, Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar coordinated with a 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to the Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park.

Looking at the generation before the 'Lost Generation,' this course explores a period in which 'modernistic' techniques and representations were unfolding from the jangling dissonances, the jarring juxtapositions, and the tumbling orthodoxies that accompanied the tectonic technological and social shifts around the turn of the century. Topics and contexts include: immigration, urbanization, race, the 'New Woman,' cultural developments (vaudeville, cinema, ragtime and the blues), and contemporaneous theories of consciousness and sexuality.