This introductory course traces the emergence of an African American literary tradition, from the late-18th century to the early 20th. In readings, assignments, and discussion we will consider the unique cultural contexts, aesthetic debates, and socio-political forces underpinning African American literary cultural and practice. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Paul L. Dunbar, the political oratory of Sojourner Truth and David Walker, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson, writing by W.E.B. DuBois, and novels by Frances Harper.

Song. Dance. Man. Woman. These are the basic components of the Broadway musical theatre. How have musical theatre artists, composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and designers worked with these building blocks to create this quintessentially American form of art and entertainment? This course will explore conventional and resistant performances of gender and sexuality in the Broadway musical since the 1940s. Why are musicals structured by love and romance?

Archives shape the stories we tell about the past. Blending fiction and fact, history conditions how archives are constructed and read. This course thinks past conventional modes of knowledge production to reimagine the use and interpretation of archival documents at Firestone Library, the Princeton University Art Museum and elsewhere. Students acquire their own methods by attending to questions of Indigenous sovereignty, access, archival silences, and traces of what Marisa Fuentes calls "dispossessed lives." We expand sites of knowledge production beyond the archive to the land itself. Archival reimagining shifts understanding of the past.

In this interdisciplinary course, participants will explore how Asian/Pacific American contemporary literary, media and visual artists create presence for absence in their novels, short stories, poems, cultural essays, films, and visual art depicting a range of Asian/Pacific American experiences. Social issues such as voluntary and forced migration, assimilation, displacement, gender & sexuality, generational differences, youth activism, identity politics, insider/outsider dynamics, the post-colonial condition, and various forms of discrimination within our respective communities as well as across them will be discussed.

This seminar is designed for those who have experience or interest in teaching literature in carceral contexts. The class plan is decided collectively, but includes a mix of readings (theoretical and practical), personal writing and reflection, and workshopping syllabi and class plans. As a final project, each student designs a syllabus for a course that could be taught in a prison.

This class introduces the historic diversity of socialisms through readings in classic socialist philosophy, literature and political writings. We are guided by these questions: How does socialism relate to communism and capitalism? How does it define democracy, equality, freedom, individuality, and collectivity? How does socialism relate to struggles for racial, gender and ecological justice? Are socialist ethics connected to religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that teach human equality? What is the "social" in socialism? How may we understand injustices committed in socialism's name alongside its striving for social justice?

Exploring literary texts and films that foreground the benefits, but also the ordeals of transnational migration and the traffic in peoples, goods, and ideas throughout the Mediterranean region, with particular stress on contemporary works and issues. Particular attention will be paid to women's experience of the Mediterranean as a realm of adventure as well as the subjection imposed by patriarchal customs, war, and colonization.

Poetry can be seen as a mode of reflection on history and, very often, as an act of resistance to it. This course will examine works written in Europe, Latin America and the US during the 20th and 21st centuries in different languages and historical contexts. We will explore their oppositional and also their liberatory effects: their ability to evoke their times, to disrupt our usual understandings while offering new political, artistic and ethical perspectives. The course will pay special attention to the work of René Char and Paul Celan, as ideal points of focus for questions of language and resistance.

An introduction to the theory of narrative, with an emphasis on theories of the novel.

What does it mean for a pre-modern author to say "I"? That is, to write in the first person. How do we understand terms like "self" and "subjectivity" in the Renaissance? We begin with some classical and medieval precursors, then turn to the heart of the matter: Petrarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare, the first two being the great European masters of the first person, the last said to have buried the first person in the voices of his characters. In the final weeks we ask ourselves about our own first persons as readers: what do "I" have to do with the way I read literature?

A survey of extraordinary writing, ideas, characters, and voices from the medieval period through the 18th century. We read diversely from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Milton, Austen and others, to trace the origins of our own modernity. What did reading and writing mean in the early modern world? Are they different today? We examine England in relation to the globe, and we ask who gets included and excluded from "great books." What do people, places and situations that existed on the margins of early English society and literature teach us about the problems we currently face? Does seeing things their way help us view our own world differently?

A poem moves, and sings, and paints pictures; it tells stories, it takes the stage, and it can play like a movie on the inside of the eyelids. This course explores what poetry can do by considering the powers it shares with neighboring kinds of making, both their expressive potentials and their technical resources. In collaboration with a wide variety of guests from Princeton's arts programs, and by means of a mix of practical and critical exercises, students will rethink the place of poetry in culture and society, historically and into the future.

The young Irish novelist Sally Rooney is widely seen as the writer who best expresses the anxieties and hopes of her generation in the western world. Her three novels - Conversations with Friends (2017); Normal People (2018); and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) - have sold millions of copies and explored sexuality, friendship, communication, social class and inequality. In this seminar course, we explore Rooney's work in the context of the recent and remarkable flowering of fiction by Irish women.

The Undead are everywhere: on movie and television screens, in books, even in the academy. This seminar will explore the literature of the undead beyond the commercially successful franchises like True Blood or The Walking Dead, from the 19th C. to the present day. Many questions are raised by these literary revenants: What do the undead do for us? What can they express or represent? How do these texts use the supernatural to address very human (political, historical, social) issues and desires, particularly in regards to postcolonial and minority discourses? Why are the undead so compelling to contemporary writers and readers?

Love is a many splendored thing. Love is dangerous. Love is a drug. Love is carnal ecstasy. Love is supernatural sympathy. Love is a subject of art; loving well is an art in itself. Many experiences, emotions, actions, and ideals travel under the name of romantic love. This course will contrast the wild and wide depictions of romance in drama, fiction, letters, poetry, and other mediums: from medieval courtiers to modern blues musicians, from yearning love letters to ecstatic sonnets. Why do we worship and worry about this singular feeling? What do the different forms and phases of love's passions have to tell us about being human?

Many challenges we face today are expressed in Chaucer's works but in a form different enough to shake us out of our heads so we can think honestly about what beleaguers human societies. On the one hand, his poetry is unfamiliar--high art from the fourteenth century cast in a language not ours, Middle English. On the other hand, his poetry is familiar, putting before our minds serious subjects we encounter today like military (and police) violence, sexual assault, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, class conflict, political protest, and social autonomy. This Chaucer class is about the politics of art and the art of politics.

Feeling lost? This course links two key forms that shape the spaces we dwell in, cross through, and imagine: medieval maps and travel narratives. These strange artifacts also index familiar categories like difference, identity, and control. We'll query what these epistemes make happen, including cultural diffusion and definitionally transgressive tales of travel. Along with critical and cognate works, these texts will expose worlds in which space wavers and dislocates where we're mapped.

This class covers the second half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the major tragedies and late comedies.

John Milton's writings reflect a lifelong effort to unite the aims of political, intellectual and literary experimentation. In doing so he became the most influential non-dramatic poet in the English language. This class explores Milton's major works, especially Paradise Lost. We'll consider Milton's highly original characters, especially Satan, with whom we are invited to sympathize, but also Adam, Eve and the Son. We'll encounter Milton's startling poetic innovations, his highly controversial ideas about sovereignty, marriage and God, and we will consider Milton's writings in relation to European precursors and 17th-century women's writing.

Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes the word "indian" is a "colonial enactment" that "has no referent in tribal languages or cultures." But as a trope it has long provided Western culture with a vision of romantic primitivism, of savage cruelty, or of the doomed victims of colonial expansion. This course will examine eighteenth-century transatlantic representations of North American Indigenous people and consider the cultural functions of these representations and their role in settler colonialism. In addition to literary texts, we will also examine art and visual culture, collected objects, and philosophical writing from the period.

The flamboyant second generation of British Romantics: Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Jewsbury. Careful attention to texts--ranging from novels, to odes, to romances, and modern epics--in historical and cultural contexts, with primary focus on literary imagination.

This course will acquaint students with the distinctive features of the nineteenth century novel, from Austen to Hardy. 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.

Close study of nine authors--the so-called literary "renaissance" of the new republic--who defined a native brand of literature that would influence subsequent American writers. Our focus will be on narrative and poetic forms that signaled independence from older ideals, offering an exhilarating yet deeply unsettling transition in literary history.

The language of a play intermingles thought and dramatic action to epitomize an unreconciled social conflict, intended to manifest within and between human bodies in real time. What have English-language dramatists of African descent identified as the central conflicts of their plays? How have their relationships to race, power, and colonial structures influenced their works? In what ways have they shaped, subverted, and advanced theatrical forms? This course will survey plays written by Black playwrights in the 20th and 21st C. We will explore dramatic works of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The modern movement in English fiction from Conrad, Joyce and Woolf to Naipaul and Rushdie, writers who changed our sense of what a novel is, what it can say and how it can say it.

This course will look at a range of British and American drama from the late twentieth century to the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the developments of the last twenty years. Questions will include the relevance of drama in a culture of mass entertainment, and drama as a response to history, place, and social trauma.

How can literature and film bring to life ideals of environmental justice and the lived experience of environmental injustice? This seminar will explore how diverse communities across the globe are unequally exposed to risks like climate change and toxicity and how communities have unequal access to the resources vital to sustaining life. Issues we will address include: climate justice, the Anthropocene, water security, deforestation, the commons, indigenous movements, the environmentalism of the poor, the gendered and racial dimensions of environmental justice, and the imaginative role of film makers and writer-activists.

In conjunction with University College London, this topic course addresses a range of topics, including the role of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality in the social dynamics of London life. Students will be considering works that represent the city in terms of the longing for kinds of relation that the city promises but may withhold. We will consider London as a city of neighborhoods, a national and imperial metropolis, a postcolonial and global city. By attending to our texts in their historical contexts and in relation to one another, we will be exploring writing about London that is as restless as the city itself.

What happens to narrative when writers aspire to write the world? How has globalization transformed not only the way novels are produced but also the internal form of the works themselves? We'll read novels that overtly strive for a fuller picture of some social or conceptual whole (e.g., migration, climate change, labor, the Internet), especially where they thematize the impossibility of such a project. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature's relation to society by examining how writers play with scale, link parts to wholes, and provincialize worlds while rendering the seemingly provincial or mundane worldly.

More than 170 years after its surprise, posthumous publication, Wordsworth's autobiographical epic is recognized as the most consequential long poem after Paradise Lost. With close reading, historically contextualized reading, deep reading, brain/psychological reading, critical reading, we study this stunning, radical experiment in genre, narrative temporalities, haunted historiography, literary history, & textual history, meta-narrative, meta-history, meta-autobiograph--pulsing with durably influential literary modernity. 13/14 bks (1805/1850, early drafts) supplemented by Tintern Abbey & the Great Ode on childhood.

"Out of Africa always something new," said Pliny the Elder. That might have been the first definition of Africanfuturism. But it also implies something that Africanfuturism fights against: the West's denial of Africa's rich history. Africanfuturism is speculative science fiction and art that reanimates African history and a future that is both prior to, and beyond, the ethnographic gaze, colonial "race science," European technocracy, and Western utopianism. The course tracks the emergence of Africanfuturism in literature from Amos Tutuola to Nnedi Okorafor, and in graphic novels, film, sculpture, collage, and political manifestos.

1922 has been described as the "annus mirabilis" (miracle year) of modernism, James Joyce's Ulysses. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows. All published in 1922. This seminar surveys these books (and others) and considers their influence today. We also discuss the history and future of modernist studies, and do extensive work in the Sylvia Beach Papers and other archives at Firestone Library.

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century whose writings are critical in rethinking our world. In this course we read Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, plus essays in A Dying Colonialism and Toward the African Revolution. We read authors Fanon studied like Césaire, Capécia, Mannoni, Wright, Sartre, and Hegel, as well as recent scholars who interpret Fanon for our times like Ato Sekyi-Otu, Homi K. Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, Reiland Rabaka, Hamid Dabashi, Glen Coulthard, Anthony Alessandrini, and Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Zahir Kolia.

This course explores the (aesthetic and material) conflation between persons and things, particularly between persons and ornaments, which in turn entails gender and racial implications. We bring the histories of the object, the ornament, and their Modernist incarnations to bear on a variety of critical discourses: the Frankfurt School, Marxism, psychoanalysis, object studies, queer and feminist theory, critical race theory, and animal and posthuman studies. We explore the entanglements between monsters, machines, and pretty things.

Phenomenology is a tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to appearances. It is also an epistemological method, committed to perpetual beginning as a way of apprehending the world and our place in it. This course is an introduction to this philosophy of continual introductions, beginning with several of Edmund Husserl's foundational texts, then moving to a multi-week reading of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, alongside recent works of critical phenomenology that engage race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

Hailed as a new genre of contemporary writing, "autotheory" is widely described as an encounter between the philosophical discourses of critical theory and the affective and embodied terrain of lived experience. In some assessments, the genre's theoretical bite comes from the performative capacity of the autobiographical to evoke the intimacy of everyday life, while in others autotheory is embroiled, sometimes uncritically, in the fiction of self-knowing that grounds modern personhood. This course assembles an archive of literature, art, media, and theory to consider both the contemporaneity of autotheory and its historical inheritances.

Literary form, social process--how, exactly, do we read and move from one to the other? What forms of knowledge and scales of textual analysis does a reflexive reading of the literary and the social enable? Through a focused survey of Marxist critical theory, this course engages students in the problem of "mediation"--understood expansively as the dialectic between literature and reality, form and history, and aesthetics and politics. We read canonical as well as recent historical materialist approaches to race, genre, empire, and other world systems to develop interdisciplinary tools for writing about economic mediations of culture.

Required weekly seminar for all English Department PhD students teaching for the first time at Princeton and scheduled to precept during the Spring 2022 semester. Balancing pedagogical theory with practical tips and collaborative discussion, the seminar helps students meet the challenges of their first semester in the classroom while also preparing them to lead their own courses. Topics include: integrated course design (preparing lesson plans; leading discussions; lecturing; teaching writing; assessment and grading); writing recommendations; and managing students, faculty, and time.

While dissertation seminars invite students to map the territory and the stakes of their thesis, and article workshops tailor writing for specific journals, this seminar focuses on the craft of writing. Our premise is that craft and argument are mutually constitutive and our method is deliberative slow motion, tracking words, sentences, paragraphs with care. The course is run as a writing workshop; we consider questions of voice, pacing, organization, and word choice. Students are expected to come prepared with a piece of writing they work on for 12 weeks.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

ENV 380, Cities, Sea Level Rise and Environmental Humanities focuses on sea level rise and its impacts on cities around the world, considering both the relevant environmental science and related literature and art. Given the global span of the texts engaging the issue of sea level rise, issues of culture and difference will be central to this course. It will consider how ideas, meanings, norms and habituations differ from one location to another and how these differences manifest in and are informed laws and social practices as well as arts and literature.

Sea Level Rise, Islands and the Environmental Humanities explores how islanders, predominantly but not exclusively in the Pacific and the Caribbean, are experiencing sea level rise and how they are engaging it in literature, art and film. Students in the seminar will also learn about the environmental science and policy related to sea level rise. They will consider solutions being put forward to address the impacts, such as managed retreat; hard engineering, such as building sea walls or artificial islands; or soft engineering, such as preserving and restoring natural buffers, be they coral or oyster reefs, mangrove marshes or wetlands.

Studies concepts, methods, and projects that have shaped the environmental humanities (EH) as a transdisciplinary field. Compares EH approaches to environmental sciences and environmental movements while considering the field's intellectual commitments to, among others, narrative, epistemology, cultural critique, and social and ecological justice. Examines current EH collaborations and centers that address extractive capitalism and the climate crisis through variously community-based, site-specific, and public work. (These include the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, KTH EH Laboratory, and Oregon Center for Environmental Futures.)

Since its early designation as a "saturnine" temperament, melancholia has been regarded as a highly ambivalent phenomenon. Torn between madness and enlightenment, it is the temperament of intellectuals and artists. In this line, melancholy aligns itself with criticism through its distance from society's ideas of happiness, or its sense of the decay of all things - including man-made orders. In a different light, however, it appears less heroic: as neurotic auto-aggression, or as resigned apathy. The seminar explores the tension between the critique of melancholia and the melancholia of critique.

Why does sex work raise some of the most fascinating, controversial and often taboo questions of our time? The course explores the intricate lives and intimate narratives of sex workers from the perspective of sex workers themselves, as they engage in myriad varieties of global sex work: pornography, prostitution, erotic dance, escorting, street work, camming, commercial fetishism, and sex tourism. Themes include: the 'whore stigma,' race, class and queer dynamics; law, labor and money; technologies of desire and spectacle; dirt, marriage and monogamy; carceral modernity; violence, agency and, above all, strategies for social transformation.

In a data-driven society, we are attuned to see data as objective, as the most representative of truth. Yet, what is behind the data? Together, we'll look at data collection, cleaning, and visualization. How do we turn complex human productions, like books and art, into data points, and should we do this? We will discuss how data is implemented in real-world scenarios and explore the impacts of data on human lives. How does data create narratives that shape our perception of the world? Using Digital Humanities methods and tools, the class will learn how to create an ethical hypothesis from humanities data.

This course will study the role that the arts can and do play in Trenton: a so-called invisible city, one of the poorest parts of the state, but intimately connected to Princeton. Examining the historical and contemporary racisms that have shaped Trenton, we will hear from activists, policy makers, artistic directors, politicians, and artists. Readings will include texts about urban invisibility, race, community theater, and public arts policy. The course will follow the development of a new play by Trenton's Passage Theater about desegregation in Trenton; students can also choose to assist in curating a show featuring Trenton artists.

This seminar will explore methods in the sociology of literature and computational literary criticism--two methodologies that approach literary works as part of larger systems of relations between people, texts, technologies, and institutions. We'll look at the data of literary study--from colonial lending library records to course syllabi--and what such they can tell us about how cultural works are produced, consumed, consecrated, and distributed. We'll learn advanced techniques in computer-assisted reading and situate them within a longer genealogy that includes book history, critical archival studies, and Marxist literary theory.

This course offers an intensive survey of ongoing efforts to revisit and revise the American theatrical canon and repertoire. Students will examine the economic, institutional and cultural forces shaping the landscape of new play production in the United States as they also read a broad selection of plays from the contemporary American theater. Working in partnership with McCarter Theatre's "Bard at the Gate" initiative, students will develop dramaturgical and other resources in response to this uniquely curated virtual platform for noteworthy but overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.

A hands-on approach to this interdisciplinary field. We will apply key readings in performance theory to space and time-based events, at sites ranging from theatre, experimental art, and film, to community celebrations, sport events, and restaurant dining. We will observe people's behavior in everyday life as performance and discuss the "self" through the performativity of one's gender, race, class, ability, and more. We will also practice ethnographic methods to collect stories to adapt for performance and address the role of the participant-observer, thinking about ethics and the social responsibilities of this work.

What happens when there is a dead body on stage? Why do corpses star in so many movies? Reverence for the dead is one of the markers of humanity, bound up with the development of societies and cultures. But we also play with dead bodies, spinning stories around them that can be austere or grotesque, tragic or farcical, haunting or hilarious. Dramas and films use dead bodies to explore fear, sex, greed, guilt, innocence and grief. In this course, we contemplate corpses from Antigone to Alfred Hitchcock and from Shakespeare's tragedies to Stand By Me and Weekend at Bernie's and bring the dead to life.

A workshop course designed to support advanced student theater and music theater writers in exploring possible performance of their writing. Students will investigate their writing with a focus on collaboration, performance and production. Individualized creative assignments will be suggested for each student. Students will be introduced to methodologies for producing new works and for theatrical collaboration, and will discuss the writer's point of view in the rehearsal room, physical staging, working with performers and character development, and exploring visual storytelling.

Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the US and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition? While their choices might be accused of recentering and reinforcing "white" narratives that marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this venture as a useful strategy to write oneself into a tradition that is itself constantly being revised and reevaluated and to claim that tradition as one's own. What are the artistic, cultural, and economic "rewards" for deploying this method of playmaking? What are the risks?