ISH Course Catalog: All Courses
HUMNTIES 100. Oedipus and His Vicissitudes: Tales of Modernity from Sophocles, Freud, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Babel
Oedipus and His Vicissitudes: Tales of Modernity from Sophocles, Freud, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Virginia Woolf
A cross-disciplinary approach to research in humanities through a fresh understanding of key texts in the modern tradition: Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo, along with his ancillary writings (to Civilization and Its Discontents), related scholarship (Simmel, Schorske, Cuddihy, Elias), and four works of literature that share Freud's preoccupation with generational conflict: Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, Isaac Babel's The Sunset, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Textual analysis and writing assignments to prepare students to write honors essays. To find out more, visit the course website on Course Work or the course page on Freidin's website. Open to sophomores and juniors (seniors, by consent of the instructors). Required of students in the Humanities Honors Program.
A cross-disciplinary approach to research in humanities through a fresh understanding of key texts in the modern tradition: Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo, along with his ancillary writings (to Civilization and Its Discontents), related scholarship (Simmel, Schorske, Cuddihy, Elias), and four works of literature that share Freud's preoccupation with generational conflict: Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, Isaac Babel's The Sunset, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Textual analysis and writing assignments to prepare students to write honors essays. To find out more, visit the course website on Course Work or the course page on Freidin's website. Open to sophomores and juniors (seniors, by consent of the instructors). Required of students in the Humanities Honors Program.
HUMNTIES 161. Texts in History: Classics from Greece to Rome
(Same as CLASSGEN 163, DRAMA 161R.) Priority to students in the Humanities honors program. Ancient texts situated in their intellectual and cultural contexts. Readings include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Medea, Thucydides Peloponnesian War, Plato's Symposium, Aristotle's Poetics, Virgil's Aeneid, Seneca's Trojan Women and Agamemnon, and Augustine's On Christian Doctrine. GER:DB-Hum
5 Units, Winter (Rush Rehm, Classics)
HUMNTIES 162. Texts in History: Medieval to Early Modern
(Same as ENGLISH 184C.) Priority to
students in the Humanities honors program. The impact of change from
the Middle Ages to the early modern world; how historical pressures
challenged conceptions of artistic form, self, divine, and the physical
universe. Interdisciplinary methods of interpretation. Texts include:
Aristotle, On the Soul; Attar,The Conference of the Birds; Dante,
nferno; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; Christine de Pizan, The Book of the
City of Ladies; Letters of Columbus; Machiavelli, The Prince; Luther,
The Bondage of the Will; Montaigne, Essays; Marlowe, Doctor Faustus;
poems by John Donne and Lady Mary Wroth; Shakespeare, Othello; and
works of art. GER:DB-Hum
5 Units, Spring (Helen Brooks, English)
HUMNTIES 163. Texts in History: Enlightenment to the Modern
(Same as ENGLISH 184D.) Priority to students in the Humanities honors program and English majors. The relationship between intellectual, political, and cultural history, and imaginative literature in the modern period. Rousseau, Kant, Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marx, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Mill, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Beckett. GER:DB-Hum
5 Units, Autumn (Alice Staveley)
HUMNTIES 170. Media Studies Internship
Practical experience working with a film or media company for six to eight weeks. Students make arrangements with companies individually and receive the consent of the director of the Humanities honors program. Credit awarded for submitting a paper after completing the internship, focused on a topic relevant to the student's studies
HUMNTIES 175. Individual Work
Individual work for students actively involved in research and writing of their honors essay (consent of the tutor required).
HUMNTIES 181. Philosophy and Literature
Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin. GER:DB-Hum
4 Units, Winter (Lanier Anderson, Phil., and Blakey Vermeule, Eng.)
HUMNTIES 196S. Contemporary Religious Reflection
(Same as RELIGST 240, RELIGST 340.) Focus is on normative and prescriptive proposals by recent and contemporary philosophers and theologians, as opposed to the domination of Religious Studies by textual, historical, cultural, and other largely descriptive and interpretive approaches. Do such normative and prescriptive proposals belong in the academy? Has Religious Studies exorcised its theological nimbus only to find contemporary religious reflection reappearing elsewhere in the university?
3-5 Units, Autumn (Brent Sockness, Religious Studies)
HUMNTIES 197F. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in Dialogue with Contemporary Philosophical, Social, and Ethical Thought
(Same as SLAVGEN 190, SLAVGEN 290.) Themes: institutions of the family and gender; debate about the female body, church, and religion; the decline of privilege and the rise of capital and industry; the meaning of art and the artist; conflicts of law and custom, country and city, andnationalism and cosmopolitanism; and the ascetic rejection of the world. Authors include Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Weber, and Freud. GER:DB-Hum, DB-Hum, EC-EthicReas.
MW 2:15-3:45, 50-51P.
MW 2:15-3:45, 50-51P.
HUMNTIES 198J. Digital Humanities: Beyond the Book
(Same as ENGLISH 153H.) How electronic texts, literary databases, computers, and digital corpora offer unique ways of reading, analyzing, and understanding literature. Intellectual and philosophical problems associated with an objective methodology within a traditionally subjective discipline. GER:DB-Hum
5 Units, Autumn (Matt Jockers, English)
HUMNTIES 198W. Digital Humanities Workshop
(Same as COMPLIT 198.) Post-print models of research and scholarship in humanities fields. Toolkits being employed in such work from wikis to interactive media to virtual worlds; and theories and practices in the digital humanities field. Focus is on student projects
4 Units, Spring (Jeffrey Schnapp, French & Italian)
HUMNTIES 199A. Honors Essay Writing Workshop
Two quarter sequence. Students discuss progress on research and writing the senior honors essay. Required for seniors in the Humanities honors program
HUMNTIES 200A. Research Proposal
Preliminary planning and study. Student drafts a proposal in Winter Quarter of the junior year to submit to the committee in charge for suggestions regarding focus and bibliography. After revisions, the student resubmits a fully developed proposal to the committee for additional comment and/or final approval. 60 hours over two quarters are expected of students developing their essay proposals for 2 units, usually 1 unit each in Winter and Spring of the junior year. Students usually make revisions of some kind in either scope or formulation of the topic. Students overseas submit proposals and receive feedback by fax or email. [WIM]
HUMNTIES 200B. Senior Research
Regular meetings with tutor (thesis adviser). Prerequisite: 200A. WIM
HUMNTIES 200C. Senior Research
Regular meetings with tutor; submission of complete first draft at least two weeks before final deadline. Prerequisite: 200B
HUMNTIES 201. Digital Humanities Practicum
For Humanities majors concentrating in digital humanities. Work related to the honors thesis under the supervision of a Stanford faculty or staff member usually affiliated with the Stanford Humanities Lab. Must be approved by the Director of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
HUMNTIES 275. Individual Work
Individual work supervised by a faculty advisor
HUMNTIES 298. Graduate Program in Humanities Symposium
Student-organized symposium; presentation of a paper informed by texts addressed in GPH seminars. Required of the GPH M.A. students and the GPH Ph.D. students who have completed their course work.
1-3 Units, Spring (G. Freidin)
HUMNTIES 301. Graduate Student and Faculty Colloquium: Mimesis and History
Required for M.A. and Ph.D. students in the Graduate Program in Humanities who have not completed the course requirements for the program. May be repeated for credit.
HUMNTIES 321. Classical Seminar: Origins of Political Thought
(Same as CLASSHIS 133, CLASSHIS 333, POLISCI 230A, POLISCI 330A.) Political philosophy in classical antiquity, focusing on canonical works of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Historical background. Topics include: political obligation, citizenship, and leadership; origins and development of democracy; and law, civic strife, and constitutional change
5 Units, Winter (Joshua Ober, Classics and Political Science)
HUMNTIES 322. Medieval Seminar: Classics and Key Works
(Same as HISTORY 317.) Colloquium focused on key primary sources that allow entry into Medieval European culture. Readings include: Augustine, On Christian Doctrine; Gregory the Great, Moralia on the Book of Job; Beowulf; the Song of Roland; and Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
3-5 Units, Spring (Philippe Buc, History)
HUMNTIES 323. Renaissance/Early Modern Seminar
(Same as SPANLIT 323.) Focus is on how authors and readers from this period theorize various historical processes: the rise of European imperialism; religious conflicts and revolutions; new understandings of the self and the world; and the rise of the novel. Authors: Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Francisco Nunez Muley, Martorell, Rabelais, Camoens, Cervantes, Montaigne, and Shakespeare
3-5 Units, Spring (Vincent Barletta, Spanish & Portuguese)
HUMNTIES 324. Enlightenment Seminar
(Same as HISTORY 334.) The Enlightenment as a philosophical, literary, and political movement. Themes include the nature and limits of philosophy, the grounds for critical intellectual engagement, the institution of society and the public, and freedom, equality and human progress. Authors include Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Diderot, and Condorcet
3-5 Units, Winter (Keith Baker, History)
HUMNTIES 325. Modern Seminar
(Same as PHIL 325.) Modern anxieties about the place of human concerns within a disenchanted natural world, focusing on texts of philosophy, social theory, and imaginative literature. Cultural and psychological consequences of perceived decline in and threats to religious faith. Authors may include Schiller, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Marx, Baudelaire, Darwin, Nietzsche, Weber, Eliot, Woolf, Sartre, and Camus
3-5 Units, Spring (Lanier Anderson, Philosophy)