A century has passed since the term 'modernism' became current, and the argument about 'postmodernism' is now four decades old. What did these categories of art and culture mean then, and how do they signify today? Has modernism become 'our antiquity' as some have claimed, or has a global perspective renewed it as a framework for contemporary art and criticism? Is postmodernism a 'thing of the past', or might it too possess an unexpected afterlife? We will take up such questions with some of the crucial actors' artists, critics, historians, museum directors and curators in these debates.

This seminar will explore the perennial fascination with forms of narrative that purport to tell true stories about actual individual lives: biography and autobiography, memoir, diary, hagiography, and more. What is at stake, what can be gained by writers and readers from life writing in its various genres? Readings will be primarily European and American. We will read and discuss some theoretical works alongside the life writings themselves.

Drawing on the expertise of distinguished Princeton faculty and visitors, this seminar aims to provide a broad, multidisciplinary perspective on central debates in European culture and society that remain urgent in the present and expand beyond geographic and temporal limits. It serves as the core course for the Program in European Cultural Studies (ECS) and the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society (EPS).

Since its advent in the 19th century, photography has been a privileged figure in literature's efforts to reflect upon its own modes of representation. This seminar will trace the history of the rapport between literature and photography by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and photography: questions about the nature of representation, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history, images, perception, and knowledge.

Beyond the myth of the City of Light, this course proposes to look at the real "lives" of Paris. Focusing on the modern and contemporary period, we will study Paris as an urban space, an object of representation, and part of French cultural identity. To do so, we will use an interdisciplinary approach, through literature, history, sociology, art history, architecture, etc. And to deepen our understanding of its history and its making, we will take a mandatory trip to Paris. During Fall Break (Oct. 13-21), students will not only (re)visit the city, but also meet guest speakers and conduct personal projects they will have designed in Princeton.

How have French writers, thinkers, and activists addressed the growing environmental crisis in recent decades? In what ways does their work converge? We look here at how fiction and thought-often inspired by the work of activists-have confronted this challenge. Themes include climate change; agribusiness and factory farming; development and (de)growth; nuclear risk; environmental justice and health; species extinction; the attention economy; and ecofeminist and decolonial thought. Novels, essays, and BDs paired with landmark works by thinkers such as Gorz, Guattari, Serres, Latour, Descola, Zask, Morizot, Pelluchon, and Ferdinand.

What happens when writers confront dance? Around 1900, dance became a topic of enormous fascination in works of Euro-American Modernists such as Mallarmé, Rilke, Woolf, Beckett. This seminar will explore this and earlier encounters, juxtaposing them with texts written by dancers such as Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham. Topics include gesture; expression; human vs. technological movement; connections/tensions between dance and language, choreography and writing, performance and text; the (de)construction of gendered and racialized otherness. Readings will be supplemented with time-based media and live performances.

An intensive introduction to the methods and practice of history, designed to prepare students for future independent work through the close reading of sources on three different topics in European history. This year these will be: 1) Luther in Worms, 1521; 2) the trial and execution of Marie Antoinette; and 3) the Eichmann trial. The class combines discussion with the occasional lecture, to introduce students to the basic vocabulary of European historiography and to develop their skills in the interpretation and analysis of documents, the framing of historical questions, and the construction of effective arguments.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a wave of revolutions swept across the Atlantic world. They shook the empires that had controlled this area of the globe, launched bold new experiments in democratic politics, challenged or overthrew existing social, cultural and religious hierarchies, and were accompanied by considerable violence. This course will examine this remarkable period in world history, concentrating on the American, French and Haitian revolutions, and devoting significant attention to issues of gender and violence, the overall global context, and theories of revolution.