English R1B

Book List

Damer, T. Edward: Attacking Faulty Reasoning; Jeffrey, Richard: Formal Logic; Joseph, Sister Miriam: Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language; Wheelan, Charles: Naked Statistics; Zola, Emile: Therese Raquin

Other Readings and Media

Natural Language Processing with Python (online resource)

Style at the Scale of the Sentence by Stanford Literary Lab (online resource)

Description

In this course we’ll study and apply research methods from a variety of fields. We will discover what it means to be rigorous inside and outside a humanistic context. We will look at many methods of interpretation, from rhetorical to discourse analysis; from formal semantics, using first order and modal logics; from statistical models in the social sciences; and from computational approaches such as natural language processing. You will write three progressively longer papers (2-3 pages, 6-8 pages, 8-10 pages), combining analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources. As part of these assignments, we will focus on strategies for drafting, revising, and polishing your work.