MTL Graduate Program > Courses

The best way to view the courses specifically sponsored by the Program in Modern Thought and Literature or required for the doctoral program is to look at our part of the Stanford Bulletin.

However, since Modern Thought and Literature has few specific course requirements, prospective applicants may wish to read through the course offerings in the literature or culture of their choice in the Bulletin, as well as those of non-literature departments and programs to get a broader view of the kinds of courses available to students in the Program.

(This is not by any means an all inclusive list of courses appropriate for students in MTL.)

  • MODERN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE (MTL)

    MTL 299. Edgework: New Directions in the Study of Culture
    Ursula Heise - Winter

    Workshop. Required of first-year students in the doctoral program. Methodologies of different disciplines, the possibility and difficulty of interdisciplinary work within these disciplines, and their connection with the individual projects of students in Modern Thought and Literature. May be repeated for credit.

    MTL 300. Modern Thought and Literature Colloquium
    Richard Simpson - Spring

    Required of first-year graduate students in the program, open to all students in the program and to others by consent of instructor. Weekly meeting of students in the program to discuss interdiscipllinary scholarship, writing, and issues pertaining to the requirements for the PhD. Presentations by affiliated faculty and by student panels.

    334A. The Modern Tradition I
    not given this year

    (Same as LAW 501.) The development over the modern period of ideas about state regulatory power and legal rationality, recent critiques of those ideas. Focus is on justice, legal interpretation, individual agency and moral choice, equality, punishment, legislation, the nation state, and international society. Readings from Sophocles, Grotius, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Austin, Bertham, Marx, Weber, Arendt, Foucault, Said, Spivak, Butler, Habermas, MacKinnon, Rose, and Kennedy.

    334B. The Modern Tradition II: The Study of Culture in the Age of Globalization
    Ursula Heise - Autumn

    (Same as ENGLISH 334B.) 20th-century theory with focus on the concept of culture and methods of studying it from diverse disciplines including sociology, anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies. Modernization, postmodernization, and globalization in their relations to culture broadly understood, cultures in their regional, national, and diasporic manifestations, and cultures as internally differentiated such as high and low culture, subcultures, and media cultures. Readings include Gramsci, Adomo, Harkheimer, Williams, Hall, Gilroy, Hebdige, Jameson, Garcia Cancini, Foucault, Bourdieu, Geertz, Clifford, Said, Appadurai, and Appiah.