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Calendar
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Autumn Quarter: |
September 24 - December 7 |
Winter Quarter: |
January 8 - March 14 |
Spring Quarter: |
April 1 - June 4 |
Summer Quarter: |
June 24 - August 14 |
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| March 10, 2008: |
Enrollment for Summer quarter begins |
| June 15, 2008 |
Commencement |
| June 23, 2008: |
Summer courses begin |
As much as possible, the sequence of seminars is organized
to provide a sense of intellectual connection, whether disciplinary
(e.g., an historical sequence) or interdisciplinary (e.g., a cultural
studies sequence). Over several years, the seminars include offerings
from various disciplines including anthropology, art history, classics,
history, literature, music, urban planning, philosophy, history of science,
political science, and psychology. Following is the list of core courses
and MLA seminars offered during the 2007-2008 academic year. Click on
a link to skip to each quarter:
MLA 101A: Foundations I (Required of incoming students)
Wednesdays, 7 – 9:30 pm
This three-quarter foundation course (MLA 101A, 101B, and 101C) is required
of all students entering the MLA Program. The course will be primarily
a lecture course, with some opportunity for discussion. Its purpose
is to introduce students to a broad overview of the main political,
philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform our vision
of the world and that underlie so much of the liberal arts curriculum.
These courses will concentrate on the most significant features of the
western cultural tradition, but will also introduce some of the most
important non-western traditions. The first quarter of the Foundations
course (MLA 101A) will cover Antiquity from Babylonia to the beginning
of the Christian era. The second quarter (MLA 101B) will cover the Middle
Ages and Renaissance. The third quarter (MLA 101C) will take us from
the Enlightenment to the present. Non-western material will include
the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic traditions.
Edward Steidle
Lecturer in English
Edward Steidle joined the Stanford English faculty in 1984. His area
of specialization is medieval art and literature. He is currently working
on comparative approaches to the study of ancient European, Asian, and
Central American cultures. He also leads travel groups to historical
sites in Italy and the Aegean.
MLA 102: The Plague: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary
Graduate Study
Wednesdays, 7 – 9:30 pm
Thematically, this course will focus on the historical, literary, artistic,
medical, and theological issues raised by the plague in history and
in our day. Practically, it will concentrate on the skills and the information
students will need to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing
a critical, argumentative graduate paper; conducting library research;
expectations of seminar participation. There will be frequent guest
lecturers. Readings will include selections from Homer, Thucydides,
Cyprian, Boccaccio, Defoe, Camus, Mann, and Kushner, as well as selected
sacred, scientific, and historical writings.
Linda Paulson
Associate Dean, Director of the MLA Program, Lecturer in
English
Linda Paulson has her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She has
taught at Stanford since 1985. Her research focuses on the Victorian
social novel, particularly on the works of Charlotte Bronte, Charles
Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope; and on the development
of a British woman's novel from Jane Austen to Doris Lessing. In 1989,
she received Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award for distinguished teaching
and service to Stanford. She also leads travel groups throughout Great
Britain and France.
MLA 214: Romanticism & Modernism in 19th-century Paris
Thursdays, 7-9:30 pm
This seminar will deal with the extraordinary set of political, social, and cultural events in 19th-century France, from the end of the Napoleonic era to the eve of World War I. These events begin and develop in Paris, since 1789 the stage of all radical changes in French society, and the seat of political power and cultural opportunity. More than ever, socio-political and cultural become closely linked, actively involving writers, artists, jurists, journalists, and teachers. Accompanying the socio-political turmoil, an equally passionate and innovative cultural revolution takes place. Romanticism, the self-proclaimed movement of an artistic generation, will transform all the inherited literary genres: poetry, theater, the novel (e.g., Victor Hugo, Dumas, Stendhal & Balzac, George Sand), as well as history and social thought (e.g., Chateaubriand, Tocqueville, Michelet, the Utopian Socialists.). The fine arts, painting in particular, also undergo a Romantic revolution, thanks to innovative artists such as Delacroix and Géricault. After 1850, the second Romantic generation—Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Lautréamont, the Symbolists and the Impressionists—will have different artistic preoccupations, but will incorporate the formal emancipation of their immediate predecessors. By focusing on certain key literary texts and pictorial representations, this seminar will follow the development of Idealism and Realism, the main trends of this period, and the two artistic and moral principles of an enormously fecund cultural era. Students will read (in translation): selected poems (distributed by the instructor); Stendhal, The Red and the Black (Modern Library, 2003, transl. B. Raffel); Balzac, Cousin Bette (Modern Library); Flaubert, Three Tales (Penguin, 2005, transl. Roger Whitehouse); and Zola, Germinal (Penguin, 2004, transl. with an introduction and notes by Roger Pearson).
Marc Bertrand
Professor of French, Emeritus
Marc Bertrand was raised in France and obtained his Ph.D. in Romance Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of L'Oeuvre de Jean Prevost and editor, contributor, and co-author of a number of other publications concerning French and cultural history. He is working on Le Roman du bâtard, a book on the contemporary French novel. A recent essay in French Cultural Studies, "L'Ecrit et l'image populaires dans les études d'histoire culturelle," advocated the inclusion of new material from popular culture in the teaching of French cultural history. Professor Bertrand loves Paris past and present, and he has participated in the Stanford in Paris program, lecturing on contemporary French society and culture.
MLA 246: Nazi Culture and California Exile
Wednesdays, 7– 9:30 pm
This course looks at some of the cultural roots of Nazi Germany, from the late nineteenth century and the Weimar Republic, as well as the character of culture after Hitler’s rise to power. In addition, we will trace the paths of some of Germany’s major writers and artists to California, as they fled the regime. Carrying with them German cultural traditions and the experience of the collapse of Weimar democracy, they made distinctive contributions to American thinking. We will look at works by Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno, as well as films by Fritz Lang and music of Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler.
Russell Berman
Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities
Russell Berman has been at Stanford since 1979. He is a member of the
departments of Comparative Literature and German Studies. He has written
widely on modern German and European literature and politics, as well
as on issues in contemporary cultural theory. He has been awarded fellowships
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His publications
have twice been awarded the distinguished book award of the German Studies
Association.
MLA 101B: Foundations II (Required of first-year
students)
Wednesdays, 7– 9:30 pm
The second quarter of the Foundations sequence will take us from the
early Middle Ages to the late Renaissance. We will discuss the origins
of the Christian West, the barbarian invasions of the 5th century, the
advent of Islam, and the great flowering of medieval culture from the
12th to the 14th century. We will then cover the early Renaissance in
Italy and the High Renaissance in Elizabethan England, and we will conclude
the course at the threshold of the Enlightenment with Milton and the
Baroque. We will also examine the major artistic trends of the periods
covered.
Edward Steidle
Lecturer in English
Edward Steidle joined the Stanford English faculty in 1984. His area
of specialization is medieval art and literature. He is currently working
on comparative approaches to the study of ancient European, Asian, and
Central American cultures. He also leads travel groups to historical
sites in Italy and the Aegean.
MLA 247: European Intellectual and Cultural History in the 20th Century: from Freud to Foucault
Tuesdays, 7-9:30 pm
This seminar will examine important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. Each meeting will focus on a single figure, usually on a single text, but the works will be discussed in terms of their widest intellectual significance. Among the figures to be treated are Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. Each student will be expected to give one short oral presentation and write an analytic essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor.
Paul Robinson
Richard W. Lyman Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Paul Robinson has written extensively on the history of European and American thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. His books include, Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette, Freud and His Critics, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson, and The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, and Herbert Marcuse. Professor Robinson describes his writing as primarily focused on three topics. The first is the history of psychoanalysis. The second is the history of ideas about human sexuality, especially the experience of gays and lesbians. The third is the connection between intellectual history and the history of opera.
MLA 248: Novels of Self-Reflection: Fictional Autobiography in Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë
Thursdays, 7-9:30 pm
Published within two years of one another, and read by the Victorian public as male and female narratives of orphanhood, David Copperfield and Jane Eyre make heroic selves of the author's alter egos. In these early novels, Brontë and Dickens each tell the story of a troubled and cast-off child who journeys through writing toward a powerful, articulate authority. Surprisingly, both authors retell the story in later, darker novels: Dickens' Great Expectations and Brontë's Villette. We will discuss the early novels as fictional autobiography, and students will choose to concentrate on one of the two later ones, as an example of the author's mature reconsideration of the past, and of the earlier novel's concerns and conclusions.
Linda Paulson
Associate Dean and Director, MLA Program
Linda Paulson has her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She has taught at Stanford since 1985. Her research focuses on the Victorian social novel, particularly on the works of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope; and on the development of the British woman's novel from Jane Austen to Doris Lessing. In 1989, she received Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award for distinguished teaching and service to Stanford.
MLA 249: Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy Then and Now
Wednesdays, 7-9:30 pm
Approaching Greek tragedy from the roots up, we will explore how our oldest drama grew out of--and helped to transform--the political, social, and ethical realities of fifth-century Athens. We will then use the issues raised in these plays to address some contemporary problems where the tragic example can prove enlightening. We will begin with Homer's Iliad (essential to any understanding of ancient Greek culture), and then turn to Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides' Medea, Heracles, Suppliant Women, Helen, Trojan Women, and Bacchae. Although focusing on the primary texts, we will also read a rich selection of scholarly responses to the plays, dealing with issues of democracy, violence, gender, and justice.
Maurice Rehm
Professor of Drama and Classics
Rush Rehm has worked extensively on Greek tragedy. As well as directing many productions of ancient Greek plays (including Stanford Summer Theater's Lysistrata, translated by Amy Freed), Rush has written several books on Greek tragedy, including Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy in the Modern World (London 2003); The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2002); Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 1994); Greek Tragic Theatre (Routledge 1992); and Aeschylus' Oresteia: A Theatre Version (Melbourne 1978).
MLA 250: A History of United States-China Relations
Mondays, 7-9:30 pm
A turbulent past, a challenging present, and an uncertain future -- such is the history and current state of relations between the United States and China. Our course will begin at the start of formal relations in the 19th century and take us to the recent past. We will consider the relationship inter-actively and in its political, cultural, social, and economic dimensions.
Gordon Chang
Professor of History
Professor of American History, Gordon Chang’s research focuses on Asian American history and U.S.-East Asia relations. He is the author of Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present (2006), Asian Americans and Politics: An Exploration (2001), Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Wartime Writing, 1942-1945 (1997), and Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972 (1990).
MLA 101C: Foundations III (Required of first-year
students)
Wednesdays, 7-9:30pm
Foundations III examines the Enlightenment, its legacy and its critics
over the past two centuries. The principal topics include the primacy
of reason, the discovery of history, critiques of conceptual thinking
(Marx and Nietzsche), the nature of modernity, and twentieth-century
explorations of reason, domination, and freedom. Course meetings typically
combine lecture format and discussion of assigned texts. A term paper
will be required.
Russell Berman
Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities
Russell Berman has been at Stanford since 1979. He is a member of the
departments of Comparative Literature and German Studies. He has written
widely on modern German and European literature and politics, as well
as on issues in contemporary cultural theory. He has been awarded fellowships
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His publications
have twice been awarded the distinguished book award of the German Studies
Association.
MLA 251: The State in History: An Introduction to Historical and Social Scientific Methods
Thursdays, 7-9:30pm
The purpose of the course is twofold. First, it will introduce the student to the methods historians use to understand and write about the past. Our theme will be centered on the historical understanding of the state, perhaps the single most important topic in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences. A better understanding of the state and its many forms in history helps to clarify many issues including the relationships of "Culture" to society. We shall focus, in particular, on both traditional approaches and the historical social science approach beginning with the classic account of Max Weber. We will also examine some specific historical examples of states and how broad comparison helps illuminate specific problems.
Joseph G. Manning
Associate Professor of Classics
Joe Manning received his PhD from the Oriental Institute at the University
of Chicago. He is a specialist in Greek and demotic papyrology and economic
history, and taught at Princeton University before coming to Stanford.
He is a former fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities,
University of Wisconsin, and was also a National Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He has lived and traveled extensively in Egypt.
MLA 252: Basic Issues in Philosophy
Tuesdays, 7-9:30pm
In this seminar, we shall explore some basic philosophical issues surrounding 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 self. Each week we will read and critically discuss one important essay in contemporary philosophy.
Chris Bobonich
Associate Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, Classics
Chris Bobonich has a Ph.D. from Berkeley and taught at the University of Chicago before coming to Stanford in 1996. He is the author of Plato's Utopia Recast (Oxford University Press, 2002). He received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and in 2005 was named a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education (this fellowship, recognizes exceptional commitment to teaching and mentoring undergraduate students.) His main area of research is in Greek philosophy and the history of ethics.
MLA 253: Reading, Writing, and Their Communities
Wednesdays, 7-9:30pm
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? When we read fiction, how do we find ourselves part of a broad, transhistorical community of readers? And how does that relationship in turn shape the way we write our own life stories?
Starting with these rather large philosophical and aesthetic questions, we will delve into one of Hanry James's last short stories, which happens to be a ghost story; we will read a novel by acclaimed Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki about trans-Pacific culture and food (My Year of Meats), as well as view one of her experimental films (Body of Correspondence); other texts include Ondatjee's magisterial novel of love and war, The English Patient; Calvino's dizzying metanarrative, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler...; and Gordimer's investigation of apartheid and family loyalties, My Son's Story. Each of these narratives tells its stories through characters who themselves tell their stories by reading those of others. This course's chief goals will be to understand better the personal and social functions of literary narrative, and to enjoy the immense pleasure such literature can bring.
David Palumbo-Liu
Professor of Comparative Literature
David Palumbo-Liu's research interests include race and ethnicity, culture and society, social theory, and globalization. He has published four books on Asian literature, ethnic literature, the movement of culture across borders, and the importance of Asia Pacific to American studies. He has taught at Stanford for sixteen years, and has taught many times for the Continuing Studies and MLA programs.
MLA 254: Foreign Policy in US Elections 2008
Thurdsdays, 6:30-9:30pm
This election year will be one of the relatively few historically in which Foreign Policy will either be the leading or secod most important issue in the campaign and the election outcome. The economy almost always leads the issue list, and foreign affairs, while always important, is almost never at or just below the top of the list unless the United States is actually at war or threatened with war. This year, 2008, is one of those years when foreign policy will be constantly in view and sharply debated. This seminar will examine foreign policy as an issue in the campaign. It will explore the historical precedents that earlier presidential elections especially concerned with foreign policy provide. It will examine the important foreign policy issues and their likely impact: for the upcoming party conventions, the following campaign and for the voting patterns in the November elections for both Congress and the Presidency. Finally the course will explore the likely impact of the campaign on foreign policy in the new administration.
Gerald Dorfman
Hoover Senior Fellow and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Gerald Dorfman is an authority and does research on British and European politics including the European Union. He is also interested in U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Dorfman served in the Agency for International Development, Department of State. He was a professor of political science at Iowa State University, a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a distinguished visiting professor at San Jose State University.
MLA 255: Shakespeare through Performance X
June 18, 21, 22, 25, 28, 29
Shakespeare's works were written for the theater, and their style, structure,
and power are only fully revealed in performance. In this workshop-style
class, students will gain an intimate understanding of the process of
theater by producing a short version of two plays. Our goal will be
to understand better how a unified interpretation and theatrical style
emerges from the collaborative efforts of an entire production team.
Students do not need to have a background in acting but must be willing
to participate fully in all areas of production. Students will write
a paper which applies their experience of production to a more conventional
reading of a play. The plays being discussed will be Macbeth and The Tempest.
Larry Friedlander
Professor of English
Larry Friedlander has been at Stanford since 1965, where his specialty
has been Shakespeare and performance. In addition to his academic and
critical activities, Friedlander worked in the professional theater
as an actor and director for many years. He has participated in major
research laboratories on a wide variety of projects connected to the
arts, technology, and education, including work at the Apple Multimedia
Lab developing innovative designs for the Globe Theater Museum in London.
MLA 256: Brian Friel's Human Comedy
Tuesdays, 7:30-9:30pm
The philosopher Heidegger argued that humans have a precious ability to ''unsay the world; to imagine it and speak it otherwise." We can transport ourselves to multiple pasts through memory and myth, to possible futures through fantasy and imagination, and to some more livable present through illusion. The stories we tell ourselves out of these imagined spaces are not "lies," but what Wallace Stevens called "necessary angels." Without them, our lives would lack shape, meaning, hope, and dignity.
No culture has been more exuberantly or subversively capable of "retelling the world" than the Irish, perhaps because they had no other way of unsaying the colonial rule that the English imposed on them 300 years ago, along with a foreign language and culture. The famous Irish "gift of gab," the craic in the pubs, and the immortal poetry of Yeats all have a strategic purpose in common -- imaginative regime change. It is, therefore, no accident that so many of Ireland's great writers look back to a time before the English arrived for their inspiration: to the Celts, to folk and fairy tales, to the peasants of the West country, and, of course, to the limitlessly resonant land. This summer we will follow this trajectory through the luminous work of four of Ireland's most beloved writers: Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Brian Friel.
This seminar is planned in conjunction with Stanford Summer Theater's 10th season which will feature performances of two plays by Brian Friel, "Translations" and "Faith Healer." As a class we will go to performances, sit in on rehearsals, and participate in the day-long symposium on Irish theatre.
Charles Junkerman
Associate Provost and Dean, Continuing Studies Program
Charles Junkerman received his PhD in comparative literature from UC
Berkeley, and has been at Stanford since 1983. He has taught in the
departments of English, History, and Anthropology on subjects ranging
from John Cage and Gary Snyder to Native American photography, English
and American literature, and cultural theory.
_______
"If you are a professor, you live a life of learning.
Most of us are not professors. The MLA program provides partial access
to such a life for the rest of us, and complements the day-to-day with
something very rare and remarkable. I'm not kidding." - Mason
Tobak ‘02, M.D.
"It’s about what the MLA program does for
you as a person, rather than what you will do with the MLA degree."
- Gerry H. Goldsholle, Internet Executive/Publisher/Consultant, Advice
Company
last updated: May 16, 2008
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