Bulletin Archive
This archived information is dated to the 2008-09 academic year only and may no longer be current.
For currently applicable policies and information, see the current Stanford Bulletin.
Registrar's Office
Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09
Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09
Graduate courses in Master of Liberal Arts
Restricted to MLA students.
MLA 9. European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century
Major European thinkers and writers and their intellectual significance from the Enlightenment to modernism. Works by Voltaire, Austen, Wordsworth, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
4 units, Aut (Robinson, P)
MLA 96. Ethics, Science and Technology: Issues and Controversies
4 units, not given this year
MLA 97. The Individual in a Globalized World: Identity and Ethics for the 21st Century
4 units
MLA 101A. Foundations I
Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. First of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA curriculum.
4 units, Aut (Steidle, E)
MLA 101B. Foundations II: the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. Second of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA curriculum.
4 units, Win (Staff)
MLA 101C. Foundations III: the Enlightenment through Modernism
Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. First of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA curriculum.
4 units, Spr (Staff)
MLA 102. The Plague: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Graduate Study
Limited to and required of second-year MLA students. The historical, literary, artistic, medical, and theological issues raised by the plague in history and the present. Focus is on skills and information needed to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing a critical, argumentative graduate paper; conducting library research; expectations of seminar participation. Readings include Homer, Thucydides, Camus, Mann, Kushner, and sacred, scientific, and historical writings.
4 units, Aut (Paulson, L)
MLA 214. Romanticism and Modernism in 19th-Century Paris: Literature and the Arts
Political, social, and cultural events from the end of the Napoleonic era to the eve of WW I. Key literary texts and pictorial representations; the development of the main trends of this period, idealism and realism, as artistic and moral principles of a fecund cultural era.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 246. Nazi Culture and California Exile
Cultural roots of Nazi Germany, from the late 19th century and the Weimar Republic. The character of culture after Hitler's rise to power. The paths of some of Germany's major writers and artists to California as they fled the regime. Works by Nietzsche, Mann, Brecht, and Adorno; films by Fritz Lang; and music by Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 247. European Intellectual and Cultural History in the 20th Century: From Freud to Foucault
Important thinkers and writers of the 20th century; their intellectual significance. Figures include Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 248. Novels of Self-Reflection: Fictional Autobiography in Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontė
Limited to MLA students. Read by the Victorian public as narratives of orphanhood, David Copperfield and Jane Eyre make heroic selves of the authors' alter egos. Brontė and Dickens each tell the story of a troubled child who journeys through writing toward an articulate authority. Both authors retell the story in later, darker novels: Dickens' Great Expectations and Brontė's Villette. The early novels as fictional autobiography.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 249. Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy Then and Now
How Greek drama grew out of and helped to transform the political, social, and ethical realities of 5th-century Athens. How issues raised in these plays address contemporary problems where the tragic example can prove enlightening. Texts include Homer's Iliad, Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides' Medea, Heracles, Suppliant Women, Helen, Trojan Women, and Bacchae.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 250. A History of United States-China Relations
Turbulent past, challenging present, and uncertain future. From the start of formal relations in the 19th century to the recent past. Political, cultural, social, and economic dimensions. Research paper based on original sources.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 251. The State in History: An Introduction to Historical and Social Scientific Methods
Methods historians use to understand and write about the past. Focus is on historical understanding of the state, perhaps the single most important topic in the humanities and the social sciences. The relationship of the state and its many forms in history to culture and society.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 252. Basic Issues in Philosophy
Morality and values, using bad means to attain good ends, whether life is absurd, the subjective and the objective, the relation between the physical and the mental, and questions about the self. One important essay in contemporary philosophy per week.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 253. Reading, Writing, and Their Communities
How do works of literature serve as ways for people to communicate with each other? How are readers writers of their own stories, and writers readers of other's stories? How do fiction readers find themselves part of a broad, transhistorical community of readers? The personal and social functions of literary narrative.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 257. Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald
While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant garde in Europe, Hurston, and Faulkner were performing anthropological fieldwork in the local cultures of the American South. The diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their experiments in the regional and global, the racial and cosmopolitan, the macho and feminist, the decadent and impoverished.
4 units, not given this year
MLA 258. Rome: The City and the World
4 units, Win (Staff)
MLA 259. Terror and Terrorism
4 units, Win (Staff)
MLA 260. Problems in 19th-Century British History, 1850-1918
4 units, Win (Staff)
MLA 261. Latency: Western Literature and Culture after WW II, 1945-1968
4 units, Spr (Staff)
MLA 262. The Economics of Life and Death
4 units, Spr (Staff)
MLA 263. Historical Crisis and Literary Response
Five novels that treat moments of historical crisis and hone in on the human dimension. How literature can represent dimensions of ethics in a time of crisis. The literary style used in each novel to portray key ethical issues at critical historical junctures. Authors include McEwan, Woolf, and Gordimer.
4 units, Spr (Staff)
MLA 264. Shakespeare in Performance XI
How Shakespeare's works and their style, structure, and power are only fully revealed in performance. Students produce a short version of two plays. How a unified interpretation and theatrical style emerges from the collaborative efforts of an entire production team.
4 units, Sum (Staff)
MLA 265. Is Patriotism a Good Thing?
4 units, Sum (Staff)
MLA 266. The Evolution of Darwin
Intellectual and physical milieux, intellectual foundations, and personal characteristics associated with the development of the theory of evolution. Darwin's travels aboard the Beagle and within the UK and the impact these excursions had on his ideas.
4 units, Aut (Staff)
MLA 267. Wicked Witches of the West
Workshop-style seminar. How powerful women are depicted in classical Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Comparisons of plays. Thematic, textual, and historical issues; theatrical practice. Sources include films if available. Scene and direction work.
4 units, Win (Staff)
MLA 398. MLA Thesis in Progress
Group meetings provide peer critiques, motivations, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.
0 units, Aut (Paulson, L), Win (Staff), Spr (Paulson, L), Sum (Paulson, L)
MLA 399. MLA Thesis Final Quarter
Students write a 75-100 page thesis that evolves out of work they pursued during their MLA studies.
4 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Paulson, L)
© Stanford University - Office of the Registrar. Archive of the Stanford Bulletin 2008-09. Terms of Use | Copyright Complaints