Graduate courses in English

The study and reading of post-classical, medieval, and early modern manuscripts in Latin, early English, and possibly other vernacular languages, and of the materials and composition of the medieval book.

3-5 units, Spr (Brown, G)

ENGLISH 223E. Whitman and Dickinson

Their poetry and other readings which may include Thoreau's Walden, the philosopher Stanley Cavell's book on Walden, and writers in the Whitman-Dickinson traditions such as Hart Crane and Ronald Johnson.

5 units, Win (Fields, K)

ENGLISH 230A. The Novel in Europe: The Age of Compromise, 1800-1848

The novel after the French revolution and the industrial take-off. Novelistic form and historical structures, emphasizing the compromise between old and new ruling class; how maps and statistics can change people's sense of cultural history.

5 units, Win (Moretti, F)

ENGLISH 240. Jacobean Tragedy

Revenge tragedies such as Hamlet, domestic tragedies such as Othello, and tragedies of suffering such as King Lear. Comparison of Shakespeare's plays to those of his greatest contemporaries, collaborators, and successors: Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, and Ford. Opportunities for performance.

5 units, Win (Hoxby, B)

ENGLISH 260B. The Politics of Language

(Same as FEMST 260B.) While the U.S. was founded on principles of linguistic plurality, the English language has always been dominant in the U.S., with standard English holding most power. The struggle to share linguistic power; how questions of gender, race, and class have shaped and responded to language wars. Varieties of English in contemporary fiction, music, and film.

5 units, Win (Lunsford, A)

ENGLISH 261B. Bright Lights, Global Cities: Reading Transnational Asia/Pacific Spatial Geographies

How transnationalism, globalization, and urbanism figure into the work of Asian American and Asian Anglophone writers. Recent debates that pit ethnic studies against area studies. Writers: Jessica Hagedorn, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alvin Lu, Amitav Ghosh, Lawrence Chua, Lan Cao, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Monique Truong.

5 units, Aut (Sohn, S)

ENGLISH 261C. Decolonizing the Novel

The globalization of the novel in English in the second half of the 20th century; the relationship of the Anglophone novel from the global south with metropolitan aesthetic practices such as those of modernism and postmodernism, and with Western and indigenous narrative theories; the politics of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, and globalization as refracted in the novel as a genre. Texts by Rhys, Naipaul, Tutuola, Achebe, Rushdie, Okrie, Carey, Coetzee, Gordimer, and Ihimaera.

5 units, Win (Majumdar, S)

ENGLISH 262. African American Autobiography

The foundational genre in African American writing. Slave narratives and conventional autobiographies, including Douglass' Narrative and Obama's Dreams from My Father. Other authors include Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Angelou. Autobiography as a Western form, with reference to authors from classical antiquity to the modern age, including St. Augustine, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, and Roland Barthes.

5 units, Win (Rampersad, A)

ENGLISH 287. T S Eliot

His poetry, drama, and prose. The formal properties of Eliot's verse, including its wit, metrical and musical structures, use of allusion and pastiche, and its thematic focus on history, city life, fertility, and death. This chameleon-like poet in other guises, such as editor, businessman, literary theorist, and cultural critic.

5 units, Win (Sullivan, H)

ENGLISH 293. Literary Translation

Seminar and workshop. For undergraduates and graduate students. The art and practice of literary translation; its tradition, principles, and questions. Final project is a translation and commentary on work of the student's choosing. Recommended: knowledge of a foreign language and experience in imaginative writing.

3-5 units, Win (Santana, C), Spr (Felstiner, J)

ENGLISH 296. Introduction to Critical Theory: Literary Theory and Criticism Since Plato

Required colloquium for incoming M.A. students. A study of the Anglo-American critical tradition from classical times to the present. Key issues include canonicity, gender, imitation, interpretation, and evaluation.

5 units, Aut (Evans, M)

ENGLISH 301A. Medieval Affect

The affective investments of medieval texts. The status and function of emotion and its common companion, imagination, in medieval religious literature (The Book of Margery Kempe, Julian's Revelations, Pearl), non-religious literature (Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, Clerk's Tale), and philosophy (Aristotle, Aquinas). Approaches to affect in contemporary literary studies. Readings in Middle and modern English.

5 units, Aut (Karnes, M)

ENGLISH 303D. Thinking in Fiction

(Same as COMPLIT 303D.) Narrative and cognition in 18th-century fictional, philosophical, scientific, and cultural texts. Probable readings: Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Swift, Defoe, Hume, Lennox, Sterne, Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, and Bentham.

5 units, Aut (Bender, J)

ENGLISH 308B. Gilded Age American Literature

American literature between the Civil War and WWI in relation to major cultural and literary developments such as regionalism, realism, and naturalism, and major political and social questions such as industrialism and economic inequality, race and black civil rights, the increased agitation for women's suffrage, and mass migration from southern and eastern Europe.

5 units, Spr (Jones, G)

ENGLISH 314. Epic and Empire

(Same as COMPLIT 320A.) 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.

5 units, Win (Parker, P)

ENGLISH 334B. The Modern Traditions II: The Study of Culture in the Age of Globalization

(Same as MTL 334B.) 20th-century theory with focus on the concept of culture and methods of studying it from diverse disciplines including sociology, anthrolopogy, history, literary and cultural studies. Modernization, postmodernization, and globalization in their relations to culture broadly understood, cultures in their regional, national, and diasporic manifestations, and cultures as internally differentiated such as high and low culture, subcultures, and media cultures. Readings include Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Williams, Hall, Gilroy, Hebdige, Jameson, García Canclini, Foucault, Bourdieu, Geertz, Clifford, Saïd, Appadurai, and Appiah.

5 units, Aut (Heise, U)

ENGLISH 344A. Drama and Poetry: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson

Major playwrights who were also major poets; the relations between text and performance, script and publication, and the drama and the non-dramatic poetry. Stage history and textual matters. Plays include Doctor Faustus, the three texts of Hamlet and the two of Troilus and Cressida, Volpone, and The Alchemist. Poetry includes Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, the Shakespeare sonnets, Jonson's poems from The Forest and Underwoods, and Hero and Leander.

5 units, Win (Orgel, S)

ENGLISH 357F. Poetry and Culture in America: Postwar to Cold War

What happened to poetry in English in the wake of high modernism and in the aftermath of global war. Works and controversies from 1945-50 established the form and purview of Anglo-American poetry for the next 25 years. Writers include Eliot, Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Bishop.

5 units, Spr (Jenkins, N)

ENGLISH 361. Memoria: The Arts and Practices of Memory

Goal is to reclaim the canon of memoria by reading primary texts in the history of memory and exploring the role memory plays in writing, particularly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Students choose focus on how memoria functions in a particular literary period, on a particular theory of memory, or on the functions of memory in a literary text or set of texts.

5 units, Aut (Lunsford, A)

ENGLISH 362S. Phantoms That Follow: Trauma and Disillusionment in Asian American Literature

How Asian American literature emerges through its relationship to oppression, trauma, and disillusionment. Approaches include critical and theoretical archives including psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and cultural studies. Writers may include Alexander Chee, Fae Myenne Ng, Peter Bacho, Suki Kim, Mohsin Hamid, and le thi diem thuy.

5 units, Win (Sohn, S)

ENGLISH 363J. British Aestheticism and Society

How art-for-art's-sake involves or repudiates the political. Major figures of late-Victorian British aestheticism (Pater, Morris, Wilde, and Swinburne); cultural criticism that precedes and flows from it (including Arnold to Adorno). Recurring themes of aesthetic professionalism, art institutions, commodity culture, sexuality, public intellectuals, autonomy, and alienation.

5 units, Win (Rovee, C)

ENGLISH 363P. Twentieth Century Authorship

The theory and practice of authorship in the 20th century beginning with the new critical attack on intentionalism. Mid-century claims about the death of the author. Genetic criticism and a cautious move towards authorial resurrection. Theoretical readings paired with literary texts that address or exemplify the problem of literary authority, including works by Henry James, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Roth.

5 units, Spr (Sullivan, H)

ENGLISH 367. British Literature of the 1930s

Goal is to construct a thick description of 30s British literature and culture emphasizing the intersections and conflicts between the public and the private, modernism and mass culture, experimental writing and documentary, word and image, national and international, poetry and prose, collective and individual imagination, utopias and nightmares. The methods, frameworks and sources that are most generative for thinking about the 30s across these divides.

5 units, Win (Jenkins, N; Woloch, A)

ENGLISH 369D. Lost Bestsellers of Victorian Britain

The interplay of the market and form. Theoretical readings and case studies: why were Pelham, The Mysteries of London, or The Woman Who Did so successful? Why was the success so short-lived? Is there a logic to literary history?

5 units, Spr (Moretti, F)

ENGLISH 372. Milton, Revolution, and Restoration

Close reading of Milton's major prose and poetry in the context of the English Civil Wars, the Restoration of the monarchy, and the writings of his contemporaries, from pamphleteers like the Levellers to poets such as Marvell, Dryden, and Lucy Hutchinson.

5 units, Win (Hoxby, B)

ENGLISH 373D. Shakespeare, Islam, and Others

(Same as COMPLIT 311.) Shakespeare and other early modern writers in relation to new work on Islam and the Ottoman Turk in early modern studies. Othello, Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and other Shakespeare plays. Kyd's Solyman and Perseda, Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk, Massinger's The Renegado, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and literary and historical materials.

5 units, Spr (Parker, P)

ENGLISH 380. Narratives of Enslavement and Theories of Redress

Literary representations and theories of enslavement, recompense, redemption, and reparation. Goal is to locate what Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman conceptualize as a redress discourse or an attempt to interrogate the kinds of political claims that can be mobilized on behalf of the slave, the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable in the political present. Sources include antebellum African American slave narratives and Korean comfort women testimonials.

5 units, Aut (Elam, M)

ENGLISH 389B. Beckett

(Same as DRAMA 152, DRAMA 358C.) Beckett's plays and late writing, which have been described as proto-performance art. Recent Beckett scholarship, including new work about his analysis with Bion.

3-5 units, Spr (Phelan, M)

ENGLISH 390. Graduate Fiction Workshop

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

3 units, Aut (Tallent, E), Win (Gordon, M), Spr (Wolff, T)

ENGLISH 392. Graduate Poetry Workshop

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

3 units, Aut (Fields, K), Win (Boland, E), Spr (Di Piero, S)

ENGLISH 394. Independent Study

Preparation for first-year Ph.D. qualifying examination.

1-10 units, Sum (Staff)

ENGLISH 395. Ad Hoc Graduate Seminar

Three or more graduate students who wish in the following quarter to study a subject or an area not covered by regular courses and seminars may plan an informal seminar and approach a member of the department to supervise it.

1-5 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff)

ENGLISH 396. Introduction to Graduate Study for Ph.D. Students

For incoming Ph.D. students. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.

5 units, Aut (Gigante, D)

ENGLISH 396L. Pedagogy Seminar I

(Same as COMPLIT 396L.) Required for first-year Ph.D students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature (except for Comparative Literature students teaching in a foreign language). Preparation for surviving as teaching assistants in undergraduate literature courses. Focus is on leading discussions and grading papers.

2 units, Aut (Vermeule, B)

ENGLISH 397A. Pedagogy Seminar II

Apprenticeship for second-year graduate students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature who teach in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Each student is assigned as an apprentice to an experienced teacher and sits in on classes, conferences, and tutorials, with eventual responsibility for conducting a class, grading papers, and holding conferences. Meetings explore rhetoric, theories and philosophies of composition, and the teaching of writing. Each student designs a syllabus in preparation for teaching PWR 1.

1 unit, Aut (Lunsford, A; Diogenes, M)

ENGLISH 398. Research Course

A special subject of investigation under supervision of a member of the department. Thesis work is not registered under this number.

1-18 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

ENGLISH 398R. Revision and Development of a Paper

Students revise and develop a paper under the supervision of a faculty member with a view to possible publication.

4-5 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

ENGLISH 398W. Orals and Dissertation Workshop

For third- and fourth-year graduate students in English. Strategies for studying for and passing the oral examination, and for writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. May be repeated for credit.

2 units, Aut (Vermeule, B), Win (Vermeule, B), Spr (Vermeule, B)

ENGLISH 399. Thesis

For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisers required.

1-10 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

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Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Alphabetical Index

Bulletin Archive

Graduate courses in English