Research Unit in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Stanford University
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Building 260-Pigott Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-2005

The DLCL is one of the largest units at Stanford: its six independent departments and the Language Center house approximately forty-nine faculty positions, seventy lecturers, one hundred and five Ph.D. students, one hundred majors, and one hundred and twenty minors. All of these people are committed in one way or another to a systematic study of the history of literatures and cultures as well as mastering their defining medium — language. Our six departments retain in their names the traces of their nineteenth-century origins: each is tied to a set of languages—Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Asian—and each focuses on a set of relevant literary and cultural traditions.

But the DLCL's linguistic purview is much broader than the names of our departments indicate; our diverse disciplinary and multi-disciplinary commitments situate us at the center of the scholarly community and make us one of the leading international centers for research and instruction in the study of literature and culture.

The forms of verbal art and cultural expression we study and teach come from cultures other than our own and from languages other than English: hence, our unique mission at Stanford. These expressive forms involve all spheres of cultural life and human endeavor, and imagine, re-imagine, or re-enact their worlds from different, often unusual perspectives.

Aristotle understood that it was an artistic—mimetic—impulse in humans that allowed a culture to be transmitted from generation to generation; and that cultural transmission and cross-breeding is a key element in what we study. Kant considered art a coequal of scientific knowledge and ethics, defining it as a “free play of cognitive faculties” in which humans come the closest to experiencing the divine act of creation. This freedom of literary imagination and its counterparts in other arts and endeavors makes us—the students of artistic and cultural expression—participant observers of the ways in which writers and artists, indeed whole cultures, make and unmake their worlds.