Writing Intensive Seminars in English (WISE)
In these highly regarded, small-group seminars, students explore unique topics in English language literature while also honing their research and writing skills through series of assignments that culminate in a substantial original research essay. Classes are capped at 8 to allow for individualized attention and rich feedback. Enrollment is by permission. English majors must take at least one WISE to fulfill WIM, ideally before senior year, and may take more than one WISE if there is room. (Majors, minors, and prospective majors receive invitations to rank preferences via an online form each year.) Non-majors are welcome, space permitting.
Note: the generic WISE course number changed in 2020 from English 162W to English 5.
Contact the English department’s Student Services Officer, Farrah Moreno (farrahm [at] stanford.edu (farrahm[at]stanford[dot]edu)) or the Faculty Director of WISE, Judith Richardson (judithr [at] stanford.edu (judithr[at]stanford[dot]edu)) for more information.
Autumn 2024
English 5HA: Haunted Rooms: Gothic and Horror Short Fiction
Instructor: Alexia Ainsworth
MW 12:30-2:20
Gothic and horror novels may stand as the haunted houses of literature. But in this course we turn our spotlight onto the smaller corners and crevices in which the ghostly and the monstrous often dwell: short stories. How does short fiction create atmospheres of terror and tension so quickly? And, what tropes and biases do these texts rely upon as a kind of shorthand to create discomfort? Exploring such questions through Gothic and horror tales from the 18th century to the present, we will attend to matters of literary form and medium, while also chasing after the haunting social, racial, and gender issues these texts raise. Considerations of who is painted as Other in tales of terror will underpin our discussions of such topics as sexism, the abject, and Orientalism, among others. Primary texts will include works by Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, John Polidori, Flannery O’Connor, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Nnedi Okorafor, and more.
English 5KA: Migrants, Natives, or Settlers? Asians in South African Literature
Instructor: Mpho Molefe
TuTh 4:30-6:20
In this course, we will consider questions of diaspora, enslavement, race, and identity from the perspective of Asians in South Africa, a country shaped by settler colonialism, enslavement, indentured labor, and apartheid, in ways both related to and different from the United States and other settler colonial states. Enslaved people in South Africa came from multiple places, including South and Southeast Asia, and after slavery’s formal abolition in the British empire, the first ship of Indian indentured laborers arrived in 1860, beginning a flow of both free and unfree Asian migrants. We will study recent fiction that represents the experiences of Asians in South Africa, including André Brink’s Philida (2012), Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane (2021), and late-apartheid stories by South African Indian authors such as Deena Padayachee and Agnes Sam. As we do so, we’ll ask: What literary modes are employed to represent these varied migration experiences? How does such literature converge and diverge from the genre conventions of European settler colonists’ writing? How do these texts situate newly arrived Asians and their descendants relative to place, history, and belonging in South Africa? To help us think through these questions, we’ll engage theoretical frameworks from diaspora studies and settler colonial studies. Brief selections from other South African literature and South African literary criticism will also help us contextualize these works. No previous exposure to South African literature is expected.
Winter 2025
English 5LA: A Perfect World? Utopian Satire in Early Modernity
Instructor: Myrial Holbrook
MW 4:30-6:20
“Utopia,” a word coined by Thomas More in his 1516 book of the same name, can be taken to mean “the good place” or “no place.” Since the sixteenth century, “Utopia” as a concept retains this double sense. On the one hand, it is the earnest imagination of better society; on the other, it is an ironic attack leveled at the failings of all societies, past, present, and future. In this course we will examine five works of what might be called “utopian satire” in the early modern period, circa 1500-1700: More’s Utopia, François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. As we explore the alternative worlds imagined by these authors, we will combine close reading of primary texts with consideration of historical contexts and a selection of influential works of literary criticism from formalist, Marxist, postcolonial, and feminist perspectives. What does each utopia reveal about the dreams and nightmares of a generation? How might utopian satire—the endlessly, and often comically, imperfect search for a perfect world—work as an instrument of social critique and perhaps even social change?
English 5MA: Black Diaspora(s) Old and New
Instructor: Seyi Osundeko
TuTh 4:30-6:20
What connects Black people in Brazil and Kenya? Germany and Ghana? Australia and South Africa? In this course, we will explore the slippery concept of diaspora and the varied meanings it has taken in the Black/African context. As we travel the world, via texts by Yaa Gyasi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Yvonne Owuor, and Cecile Emeke, from the 19th-century Cape Coast to our current moment, we will examine different layers, trajectories, and forms of dispersal and return. Drawing on literary scholar Cajetan Iheka’s framework of “Old” and “New” diasporas (“old” referring to the transatlantic slave trade and “new” referring to postcolonial and neocolonial migrations), we will also situate our readings in relation to major arguments in Black Diaspora Studies and their evolution since the field’s inception in the late 1980s and 1990s in the work of such theorists as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. Throughout the course we will ask: How does one define diaspora? What makes movement diasporic? And who gets to decide?
English 5NA: The Meaning of Newness: Traditions of British Modernism
Instructor: Tong Liu
TuTh 9:30-11:20
Good news! After the intervention of a century, it is the 'twenties again—maybe not quite as roaring this time, but still resounding with a sense of impending change. As we celebrate multiple modernist centennials in our own decade (e.g., those of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway), there remains something viscerally electrifying about Ezra Pound’s famous dictum “Make It New.” And yet this line—which, paradoxically, only came to be seen as a modernist slogan in retrospect, after the movement became “old news”—also invites some questions from our historical position: What was the galvanizing power of “newness” as a privileged concept for modernism? Does newness have a stable literary meaning? In this seminar, we examine the historical and formal newness of British modernist literature by tracing its literary ancestry, moment, and legacy. Reading texts by T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and W.H. Auden, among others, we’ll ask: From what ashes of hegemonic traditions did modernism have to rise in order to pronounce itself new? What new traditions did it beget? To what extent was the newness a fiction, and to what extent was it a reality? Finally, was British modernism itself a single tradition, or plural ones?
Spring 2025
English 5PA: Resisting English: Multilingualism in American Literature
Instructor: Caroline Bailey
MW 11:30-1:20
This course explores how 20th and 21st century Anglophone authors resist the rising dominance of English as the language of social, economic and cultural power by inserting multilingualism into English-dominant literature, either through direct translation, codeswitching, language creation, or other forms of linguistic interweaving. Course readings will include multilingual works by writers such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Xu Bing, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ted Chiang, and will feature forms of linguistic expression ranging from indigenous pictographic writing to sci-fi alien languages. We will complement these readings with texts from the fields of translation theory and postcolonial studies, including selections from Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Benjamin, Amitav Ghosh, and Jacques Derrida. Student will learn how to read and write about this kind of theory, while also developing their skills in archival research through visits to the Library Special Collections. This course will be accessible to students regardless of linguistic background, and no additional foreign language skills are necessary. Instead, as we bring our speculative curiosity to texts containing languages we may not be able speak or read, we will confront—and upend—assumptions about the linguistic Other. We will also reflect on the different ways we use language in everyday life, and consider how we might translate that usage into our own writing.
English 5QA: “Dressing Up” in the Eighteenth Century
Instructor: Sabrina Yates
TuTh 9:30-11:20
In this course, we will delve into the multifaceted role of clothing as both a mask and a mirror, exploring the art of dressing up not only as a form of self-expression but also as a tool for social maneuvering in fiction and non-fiction of the long eighteenth century. How do garments transcend mere fabric to become a language of their own that individuals employ to negotiate status, desire, and agency? What compels someone to use disguise to assume an identity far removed from their own? How do changes to outward appearance spur internal transformations? From wealthy women disguised as sex workers and vice versa, to English Christians using clothing to assimilate with Turkish Muslims, to female husbands pursing wives and masculine careers after donning breeches, to twenty-first century Black women embodying the eighteenth century through dress, we will see how dressing up is at the heart of eighteenth-century interpretations of self and Other. Gaining a grounding in eighteenth-century literature more broadly as we read a variety of genres (including plays, poems, letters, memoirs and periodicals), we will uncover the secrets hidden beneath the seams and discover how dressing up has shaped—and continues to shape—our perceptions of self, relationships, and society.
English 5JA: Women Without Men: Experiments in American Literature, 1890-1940
Instructor: Katie Livingston
TuTh 4:30-6:20
Spinsters, lesbians, workers, writers: women without men have been the object of sexual intrigue and social anxiety throughout the long history of American letters. In this course, we will think about women in American literature who are neither economically nor erotically dependent upon men, or else exhibit resistance to connections (sometimes economically or socially necessary) with men. Focusing on works from the 1890s to 1940s by authors such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Nella Larson, we will ask: how have women writers imagined a social and economic life without men? Where, why, and how do the women in these narratives fail to achieve such a life (many of our narratives will end, tragically, in death or suicide)? And what literary moves and experiments have such efforts to circumvent male-dominated worlds (including that of literature itself) engendered? As we explore structures of both platonic and lesbian relationships between women, our critical emphasis will be on feminist and queer theories, which students will further employ to analyze questions of class, economics, and narrative form. Students will come away with the ability to conduct independent literary research and produce scholarly writing.