Two new faculty members join the English Department this year. Check out their new courses!
Mark McGurl
Mark McGurl's scholarly work centers on the relation of literature to social, educational and other institutions from the late 19th century to the present. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), which was the recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for 2011.
McGurl’s previous book was The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton). He has also published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History. He teaches a range of classes on American literature and related topics.
McGurl received his BA from Harvard, then worked at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books before earning his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins. He has held fellowships from Office of the President of the University of California and the Stanford Humanities Center.
2011-12 Courses:
English 145G: American Fiction Since 1945
English 151C: Wastelands
English 366C: Literature @ Scale
Sianne Ngai
Sianne Ngai specializes in American literature, twentieth-century literary and cultural theory, poetry, film studies, and feminist studies. She is the recipient of a 2007-08 Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a 2012-13 Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. She is a member of the advisory boards of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Studies in American Fiction. Sections from her forthcoming book on aesthetic categories have been translated into Swedish and Italian.
Her publications include:
Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005).
“Our Aesthetic Categories.” PMLA 125.4 (October 2010): 948-958.
“Merely Interesting.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 777-817.
“The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-847.
“Black Venus, Blonde Venus,” in Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. Bad Modernisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
“‘A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice’: Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject.” American Literature 74.3 (September 2002): 571-601.
2011-12 Courses:
English 139A: Henry James
English 162-2: Critical Methods
English 283A: The Paranoid Imagination
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Two new faculty members join the English Department this year. Check out their new courses!
Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson is Associate Professor of English with emphasis in creative writing at Stanford University. A Whiting Writers’ Award winner, his fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Paris Review, Tin House and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. He teaches Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, The Novel Salon and The Grahic Novel.
ENGLISH 185A: The Trauma Narrative (seminar)
Winter Quarter, 2010-2011 MW 1:15-3:05, Room: 110-101
It’s expected that literary characters grow and change. It’s accepted that characters value insight and discovery and are willing to face conflict, overcome obstacles and make meaningful choices on their paths toward satisfying deeply held desires. But what of characters whose stories are of loss, dislocation and marginalization? What shapes and structures are organic to painful stories? By combining a critical and creative approach, this seminar will examine essays, short stories and novels to reveal how trauma narratives make special use of architecture, temporality and narrative strategy to produce forms that challenge traditional conventions and reader’s expectations.
ENGLISH 185J: Creative Non-Fiction: A Form for Our Times (seminar)
Spring Quarter, 2010-2011 MW 1:15-3:05, Room: 420-371In the early decades of the novel, relatively few questioned what the form was and how it came into fashion. But that’s what this seminar hopes to do with “creative non-fiction,” a genre that has appeared, Athena-like, armed with verisimilitude, emotional truth and narrative drive. There’ll be readings across the genre, a survey of its influences and an attempt at definition. The course will combine personal and critical writing in the hopes that students will better appreciate this mode of discourse not only as a rare glimpse at a genre forming itself, but as a powerful tool for creative expression.
Vaughn Rasberry
Vaughn Rasberry’s interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His current book project, a study of black literary and intellectual history of the post-World War II era, challenges the notion that landmark civil rights initiatives emancipated African American writers from the constraints of writing about racialized experience and prompted their acquiescence to the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Alternatively, his project illuminates how black literary production engages, often eclectically, the coordinates of the global Cold War: the discourse of totalitarianism and total war, the formation of the Third World, and the role of communism and other international political currents in the dissolution of Jim Crow and colonial regimes. His forthcoming article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," will soon appear in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press). In addition to his courses for the current academic year, he looks forward to offering seminars such as The Black Bildungsroman of the 1940s and 50s, The Scramble for Africa in the Making of the Century, and the Postcolonial Cold War: History, Literature, Theory. He also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the program in American Studies.
ENGLISH 43/143: Introduction to African American Literature (lecture)
Fall Quarter, 2010-2011 MW 11:00-12:30, Room: 200-030
This lecture course will explore African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals, trickster tales, and slave narratives to recent developments such as black feminist theory, postmodern fiction, and hip hop lyricism. We will engage some of the defining debates and phenomena within African American cultural history, including the status of realist aesthetics in black writing; the contested role of literature in black political struggle; the question of diaspora; the problem of intra-racial racism; and the emergence of black internationalism. Attuned to the invariably hybrid nature of this tradition, we will also devote attention to the discourse of the Enlightenment, modernist aesthetics, and the role of Marxism in black political and literary history.
ENGLISH 152A: "Mutually Assured Destruction": American Culture and the Cold War (seminar)
Fall Quarter, 2010-2011 MW 1:15-3:05, Room: 160-328
This seminar takes the temperature of the early Cold War years via readings of Soviet and U.S. propaganda; documentary film and film noir; fiction by Bellow, Ellison, O’Connor, and Mailer; social theory by Arendt, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School; and political texts such as Kennan’s Sources of Soviet Conduct, the “Truman Doctrine” speech, and the National Security Council Report 68. Major themes include the discourse of totalitarianism, MacCarthyism, strategies of containment, the nuclear threat, the figure of the “outsider” and the counterculture, and the cultural shift from sociological to psychological idioms.
ENGLISH 262C: African American Literature and the Retreat of Jim Crow (seminar)
Spring Quarter, 2010-2011 MW 11:00-12:50, Room: 160-329After the unprecedented carnage of the Second World War, the postwar era witnessed the slow decline of the segregated Jim Crow order and the onset of landmark civil rights legislation. With this watershed moment in mind, this seminar explores two questions: what role did African American literature and culture play in this historical process? And what does this shift in racial theory and praxis mean for black literary production—a tradition constituted by the experience of slavery and racial oppression? Examining formal innovations in African American literature (e.g., the novel of “white life,” the black Bildungsroman, experimental fiction), we will address these questions against the backdrop of contemporaneous developments: the onset of the Cold War, decolonization and the formation of the Third World, and the emergence of the “new liberalism.”
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We have three new Studen Advisors: Grace DeVoll, Mary Gumport, and Emily Rials. They have started holding weekly office hours. Drop by 460-207 to say hi, ask questions, or just talk literature! (Grace: Monday 1:30-3:30, Emily: Tuesday 9-11, Mary: Wednesday 3:30-5:30)
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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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