This course investigates the political, social, and aesthetic conditions that shaped the development of 19th-century African American literary culture. As we read across genres and archives, will develop a deep understanding of the key questions and preoccupations that animate an African American literary tradition.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race as well as gender, sexuality, disability, etc. read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

What is the relationship between race and genre? Through a survey of major works and debates in Asian American literature, this course examines how writers employ a variety of generic forms--novels, comics, memoirs, film, science fiction--to address issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, memory, immigration, and war. By placing racial formation in relation to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of literary texts to deepen our historical understanding of Asians in the U.S. and beyond, and probe into what labeling a work of literature as "Asian American" allows us to know and do.

Why are borders so central to our political, moral and affective life? Examining legal theory, novels and films of 20th- century migrations alongside poetry and forensic reports of recent border-crossings, this course traces how mobile subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial militants - have driven the formation of new ethics, political geographies and radical futures. We will situate borders in relation to practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the factory and, finally, we will ask: why did we stop relating to migrants as political subjects and begin treating them as the moral beneficiaries of humanitarianism?

This class explores the underside of civility: the indifference of good manners, the controlling attention of caregivers, the loving coercion of family, the quiet horrors of neighbors, friends, and allies. We will explore characters in fiction and film whose militant niceness exercises killing privilege or allows for the expansion of their narcissism...people with "good intentions" who nonetheless wreak havoc on the people and the environment around them. We will consider "niceness" as social performance, as cultural capital, as middle-class value, as sexual mores, as self-belief, and as affective management.

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

Students learn to write clear and persuasive criticism in a workshop setting while becoming familiar with a variety of critical practices and research methods. The course prepares students to write the junior paper which is due in April 2025. Each seminar section will pursue its own topic: students are assigned according to choices made during sophomore sign-ins via system outlined below. Required of all English majors.

In this course we will read influential texts in political thought and theory. We will examine authors you hear a lot about but perhaps never had the opportunity to study in detail, much less in one setting: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, Foucault, Fanon, Debord, Jameson, Spivak, and Butler. Students majoring in Politics as well as literature, Philosophy, and History are welcome, as are majors in the Social, Natural, and Applied Sciences. No prior knowledge of these thinkers is required; just the wish to read challenging works and discuss thought-provoking topics.

An introduction to American graphic narrative by way of understanding comics as a medium of textual and visual expression. Readings consist of modern and contemporary works that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, novel and memoir, memory and history. In reflecting on the medium-specific qualities of comics, the course addresses questions of genre definition, cartoon aesthetics, and readerly experience.

How does the Old English poem Beowulf work? How did centuries of singers and audiences - and scholars like Tolkien - keep in motion this cunningly crafted elegy, with its monsterous matchups and its chilling contemplation of dying? What literary kin had Beowulf, then and now? We'll reply to these queries, examing a crucial poem that never disappoints in its orb of gleaming materiality and in its immediate manuscript and language contexts. Topics will include how the poem creates poetic space, voices itself, and how we, in our times, can reconstruct, animate, and perform contemporary versions of Beowulf.

The first half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the great comedies and histories of the 1590s, culminating in a study of Hamlet.

What makes a play political? When and why does producing political theater matter? In this course, we will look at contemporary and canonical plays from across the globe that take on various political crises (e.g., Argentina during the "Dirty War"; South Africa under Apartheid; the Liberian Civil War; Eastern European Communist censorship). Analyzing plays as texts and performances, we will consider what makes theater a useful medium to respond to conflict and social trauma. We will explore how playwrights around the world have aimed to create social change through dramaturgy.

A study of the Romantic movement in an age of revolutions: its literary culture, its variety of genres, its cultural milieu, and the interactions of its writers. Major figures to be studied include Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Two 90-minute seminars.

This class considers Jane Austen not only as the inventor of the classic novel but also as an inspiring, ceaslessly discussable author who is--thanks to a steady stream of adaptations and spinoffs--our contemporary. Pairing each novel with recent adaptations and current issues, we will discuss how Austen treats love, violence, sisterhood, sex, and power. Exploring Austen's difference as well as her modernity, we will learn as much about ourselves as about her novels.

New York has long been a hub for Black creatives. From the community of Black writers living in Brooklyn in the 1850s to the artists who gravitated to Harlem in the 1920s to the collectives of Black women authors who gathered in the 1980s, New York is a key territory in Black literary culture. This course examines how New York emerges in the Black literary and cultural imaginary. As we think about New York as a place that is as imagined as it is real, we will consider the interplay between race, space, aesthetics, & politics, and literary movements, focusing on what the city makes possible & what it forecloses.

This course will acquaint students with some of the distinctive features of the nineteenth century British novel, from Austen to Eliot. Lectures will seek to illuminate relations between social and aesthetic dimensions of the texts we read. We will consider how these fictional imaginings of things like love, sex, money, class, and race help shape the ways we live now.

The Bible is more than one book. "Bible" comes from a Greek word that literally means "books." Some are hauntingly beautiful, others profoundly philosophical. Some are simultaneously boring and terrifying; some are riveting and funny. We'll think about how these different kinds of literature belong in the same overarching book: how are the ways in which they are written a part of the overall meaning or meanings of the Bible? We'll survey the literary devices that Biblical texts use and the beauty of its language. This way of reading isn't intended to challenge any faith tradition, nor does it assume that you've ever looked at the Bible before

This seminar will explore a wide range of modern drama, poetry, and fiction by Irish authors. We will read plays by John M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brian Friel, and Eva O'Connor; fiction by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Anna Burns, and Sally Rooney; and poetry by W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi. We will probe the roles of Irish history, culture, and law in shaping Irish authors and their writings. Themes will include sexual identity and sex crimes; human rights; contracts, blackmail, and defamation; political and domestic violence; masculinity; and abortion rights.

How does literature embody law, both as a principle of literary construction and as an examination of justice? Can literature represent law persuasively? Can it cure the ills from which law suffers? This precepted course will stress interdisciplinary analysis of literature and law; offer overviews of law and social justice in history and different cultures; examine gender, race, and religion in their relation to law and its depictions; and highlight close reading of rich, complex literary texts. Students pursuing literature-related course study as well as students interested in law school or legal studies will benefit from the course.

What does postcolonial literature have to do with economic development? How can literature and literary analysis help us better understand global economic inequality? This course examines the role that literature and literary thinking have played in legitimating, critiquing, and revising the 20th and now 21st century project of "development." Reading global works of literature and film alongside documents such as the World Bank's first "mission" report and its 2000 World Development Report, we'll study how narrative shapes issues like poverty and industrialization, international aid and (neo)colonialism, and economic justice and debt relief.

What was magical realism and why are so many contemporary authors returning to it now? In this course we will explore the diverse contexts in which this narrative mode has flourished. We will assume a global context and texts will be drawn from an interdisciplinary mix: novels, films, plays, and critical essays.

In 1649, the King of England was beheaded. Soon after, Parliament abolished the monarchy altogether. Yet this break with the past would not give way to unanimity: the next decade would give rise to innumerable competing visions of the political future. What's more, the regicide was only one "dissolution" that shaped political life in the C16th & C17th. Established orders collapsed under the pressure of religious, imperial, environmental, and intellectual change. We will turn to Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Harrington, Marvell, Cavendish, and others to see how dissolutions shaped the emergence of a recognizably modern political world.

"Money, money, money, and what money can make of life!", a woman laments in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. We will read four novels in this class, two by Charles Dickens (Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend), one by Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White), and one by George Eliot (Silas Marner) to see how money and the need for it penetrate souls and societies in these works. We will consider how conceptions of gender, intrigues of sexuality, and fears of foreigners shape the imagination of the power and limit of money in the world that these three eminent Victorians inhabit and illuminate.

In this course students will make progress on their theses - developing a topic, consulting advisors, and completing a substantial draft portion of the work by the end of the semester. The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.

A survey of shorter poetry in the 1500s, from Wyatt to Donne, canvassing a variety of topics from Reformation theology to court politics, but with an emphasis on the century's transformation of the poetic resources of the English language. We study the development of poetic and rhetorical theory alongside the poetry, learning a descriptive and analytic vocabulary that Tudor poets might (partly) recognize. We also imitate their poems--there are weekly exercises in verse composition--just as Sidney and Spenser did with Virgil and Ovid, and with one another.

In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, how did Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans experience the land and Atlantic littoral from Barbados to Boston? The course disrupts assumed connections between writing and empire to foreground the embodied experience of Europeans and Africans in an unprecedented Atlantic migration. Alongside these arrivals, we examine how Indigenous people adapted to and survived this cataclysmic change. Considering people, non-human animals, plants, earth, and water relationally, we form a critical practice of unsettlement that reimagines the colonial archive as a contingent set of historical futures.

What is poetry's data? And how is this question different than "What is poetry"? We read poetry from the eighteenth century to now and explore questions of poetry's use as data in disciplines as various as folklore, philology, linguistics, literary history, literary theory. Conversely, we ask what the perceived resistance to datafication has reified about affect, authenticity, genius, originality, intention, or indeed Poetry? Understanding poetry's data through quantification, pedagogical instrumentality, prosodic regularity, and machine learning, we think about how poetry's data impacts our contemporary reading practices.

Exile entails a wrenching relocation in space, but it also can disarrange the sense of time. This course explores the double time of exilic life, what Nabokov in Pnin calls physical time and spiritual time. Physical time accentuates the pangs of exile--inhabiting a present so radically different from the familiar past. Spiritual time, in which memory and nostalgia seek refuge, is more mobile and creative; it can recall a vanished world and project a future return. We explore the theme of exilic time through its modern variations from Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Joyce's Ulysses to Naipaul's The Mimic Men.

How to read history through form--not just around it? How do we move from culture to political economy, aesthetics to politics, and back? This seminar surveys the methods of dialectical materialism and Marxist aesthetic theory. Rooted in the Greek dialegein--from dia (through) and logos (discourse)--dialectics involves holding oppositions and articulating mediations between aesthetic form and social process. Through exemplary models of literary criticism, students learn to historicize texts across disciplines, engaging with topics such as racial capitalism, uneven development, gender, labor, and contemporary culture.

This course balances works of canonical aesthetic theory, contemporary queer of color critique, theories of the senses/the sensible, and minoritarian art. One of the connections that is important to the course is that between everyday acts and practices and those practices of making that become legible as art. The aim is to be a robust introduction to various traditions of thinking the relation between aesthetics and political imaginations. Students also encounter important contemporary critics whose work might serve as models for their own.

This immersive, multimedia course invites us to come to our senses in creative ways, exploring climate crises like melting ice, rising oceans, deforestation and displacements. We will come alive to hidden worlds, kayaking the Millstone and trips to Manhattan, engaging animal and environmental studies. Through film, images and writing, we explore the vital ways environmental issues intersect with gender, race and sexualities. Themes include: wilderness; national parks; violent settler colonialism; masculinities; militarization; Indigenous knowledges; animal intelligence and emotions; slow violence; the commons; and strategies for change.

This is a workshop in the fundamentals of writing plays. Through writing prompts, exercises, study and reflection, students will be guided in the creation of original dramatic material. Attention will be given to character, structure, dramatic action, monologue, dialogue, language and behavior.