STANFORD ENGLISH MAJOR: THE NEW REQUIREMENTS
In 2010-2011 the Stanford English Department introduces a new curriculum for the English major. The new curriculum features a team-taught, three-quarter core sequence that will provide a broad perspective on the history of literature in English (English literature, American literature and Anglophone literature) from the Middle Ages to the present. The "Literary History" sequence is not a survey but rather a systematic narrative investigation of key literary themes, movements and innovations (cultural, social, religious, political and ideological) and tracing an arc from Caedmon and Chaucer to Jane Austen to Frederick Douglass to Karen Tei Yamashita and William Gibson.
Designed to give the English major more structure and (through an increased number of electives) more freedom, the new curriculum also features three broad methodological requirements in Poetry, Narrative and Methodology. The major will culminate for seniors with a Senior Seminar, a capstone course focused on close interaction with the faculty on cutting edge research topics.
The new curriculum marks an exciting moment for the English Department, faculty and students alike. As the curriculum comes into effect, Stanford English majors will engage in new, absorbing and meaningful ways with both the extraordinary local detail and the stunning big picture of literature in English. Be a part of it!
Revised Requirements:
*3 Methodology courses
1. Poetry and Poetics
2. Narrative and Narrative Theory
3. Critical Methods
*4 Historical courses
3-quarter sequence
+ 1 course in the history of literature
*1 Senior Seminar
*Approx. 6 Emphasis Electives
= ~14 courses total
Video of the 2009 English Department Graduation Ceremony
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We're pleased to announce the debut of the English undergrad blog, Cellar Door, which has been developing for many months!
Cellar Door aims to be a helpful resource for English undergrads, featuring interviews, articles, event-listings, department news, and other useful (and hopefully entertaining) English-related information. We'll be updating the blog regularly, so we encourage you to bookmark us or subscribe to our RSS feed.
If you have suggestions or questions, either about Cellar Door or about the major, please don't hesitate to contact or visit us (our contact info and office hours are listed on Cellar Door).
-Peer Mentors Janet Kim, Ruth McCann, & Sammie Sachs
Check out these undergraduate courses from our three new extraordinary English faculty members this year:
Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature Claire Jarvis joins the department after completing her dissertation entitled “Suspended Pleasures: Supersensual Masochism in the Age of Victoria” at Johns Hopkins University.
Jarvis’s 2008-09 Courses:
English 135 Victorian Poetry (Winter)
While often imagined as a dead space between the Romantic and Modernist movements, Victorian poetry offers great thematic, formal, and aesthetic innovations. We will read, for example, R. Browning’s dramatic monologues, Tennyson’s Idylls, Swinburne’s English Sapphics, and Michael Field’s collectively written lyrics as well as narrative Victorian poetry.
English 20/120 Masterpieces of English Literature II (Spring)
Students will study literature from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Topics include the rise of the novel, lyric and dramatic poetry, Romanticism, realism, Modernism, characterization, narrative voice, and the influence of history on literature.
English 135H Thomas Hardy (Spring)
“Thomas Hardy is unique among English writers in achieving recognition both as a major novelist and as a major poet. He is also exceptional in his combination of a self-consciously “modern” cast of thought with an intense, apparently paradoxical, preoccupation with the personal, local, and national past.” So writes Michael Millgate in his seminal biography of the author. In this course, we will examine the autobiography, novels and poems of Thomas Hardy.
Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature Michelle Karnes joins us from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her scholarship involves modern theoretical concerns with cognition and the imagination by tracing their origins in the Middle Ages.
Karnes’s 2008-09 Courses:
English 180 The Bible as Literature (Autumn)
English literature abounds with references to the Bible that register not only the cultural and religious significance of the text, but also its power and beauty as literature. We will focus on its literary qualities, reading selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament with attention to form, style, structure, themes, and the historical circumstances of the text’s composition.
English 111 Age of Chaucer (Winter)
This course is a survey of late-medieval English literature, focusing on major authors, genres, and issues including the politics of writing in Middle English, the Christianization of Arthurian romance, the construction of social class, and so on.
Assistant Professor of British Literature Hannah Sullivan joins the department after completing her dissertation entitled “Passionate Correction: The Theory and Practice of Modernist Revision” at Harvard University.
Sullivan’s 2008-09 Courses:
English 153C British Literature of the 1910s (Winter)
The 1910s opened with the birth of modernism in Britain, but ended elegiacally, as the country mourned almost a million dead. This course will study the diverse literary output of a decade interrupted by war, including novels by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence, short stories by Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce, the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, and the avant-garde poetic experiments of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
English 287 T.S. Eliot
This course will consider the formal properties of Eliot’s verse—its wit, metrical and musical structures, use of allusion and pastiche—alongside its thematic focus on history, city life, fertility, and death. At the same time, we’ll consider this most chameleon-like of poets in some of his other guises, as editor, businessman, literary theorist, and cultural critic.
English Department Faculty select the one book they recommend English majors and minors read this summer:
“Middlemarch.” – Professor Jennifer Summit, Chair
“Middlemarch because it is the greatest book ever written and George Eliot is the smartest person who ever lived. [English majors should] read it and tremble for their mortal human souls.” – Associate Professor Blakey Vermeule
“The Bill McKibben Reader, or anything by this brilliant environmentalist: www.billmckibben.com. Why? Ours and future generations may well depend on such consciousness.” — Professor John Felstiner
“G. B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. I'd never heard of it. A friend gave it to me. It was written by an 80 year old recluse on the island of Guernsey, which is where it's set, and it seems to me one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Really.” — Professor Stephen Orgel
“Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, a great novel.” — Associate Professor Denise Gigante
“Read Dickens' David Copperfield. It is the single greatest novel of personal development ever written, and the model for literary fiction worldwide from Salman Rushdie to W. G. Sebald. Its characters are memorable, its drama unforgettable.” — Professor Seth Lerer
“Getting Mother's Body by Suzan Lori-Parks.” — Associate Professor Michele Elam
“A Briefer History of Time. The book might at first seem to be a surprising recommendation for English majors, but Hawking's study, which consolidates and updates his earlier book A Brief History of Time (1988), focuses on the ‘evolving picture of the universe’ and changing conceptions of time and space, all of which can add to the historical and cosmological perspectives we bring to our reading and analysis of literature. Time and space coordinates are central to what we do in literary studies. Hawking includes a helpful "Glossary" of specialized terms. Summer seems like a good time to ‘explore’ this provocative subject.” — Senior Lecturer Emerita Helen Brooks