This course tracks the evolution of Black literature and literary culture from the mid-18th century to the early 20th. Moving across a range of genres - from poetry to drama to fiction - and mediums - from the periodical to the bound novel - we will interrogate the relationship between literary form, aesthetics, and cultural politics, while developing a deep understanding of the emergence of 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.

An exploration of the written and oral literary traditions of Native American and Indigenous authors. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. The course will include a service-learning trip to the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm and an opportunity to learn some Lenape, the ancestral language of New Jersey.

Surveying longstanding and emergent themes in the field of Asian American Studies, this course examines how "Asian American" is both a category constructed in service of power and a revolutionary identity formed in rebellion against it. How has US military intervention in Asia in turn shaped shifting ideas about Asian America/the "Asian American"? How might these connections complicate dominant framings of when war begins and ends? In what ways is Asian American racial formation related to settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism, and what might an Asian American movement that is accountable to these processes look like?

In this seminar, students will have the opportunity to explore the diversity of Asian Pacific American cultures, their numerous representations and how APA cultural producers create multidimensional images and narratives. Throughout the semester, students will analyze social issues such as the culture wars, mainstreaming, branding, and centering the margins within mainstream, independent and alternative contexts through utilizing a wide range of film and television screenings; critical and fictional writing; blogs/vlogs; music; social media platforms; and interactions with professionals in film/television, literature, journalism and academia.

Investigation of the concepts of excess and surplus across several domains: political economy, psychoanalysis, theories of reproduction, environment, literary and artistic representation. In relation to value, affect, energy, material wealth, waste, population, what is an excess? Is more synonymous with "too much"? What are the conditions and uses of surplus? What are its metrics? What are the languages of surplus? In theoretical and literary readings, we consider the parameters and complexities of surplus and excess: the concepts' internal divisions and their capacity to cross discursive thresholds. There may, of course, be too much reading.

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.

The making and interpretation of fictions are among our everyday activities, whether or not we realize it; however, we don't always consider what "fiction" is, or what it means. This course will introduce students to the diverse and specific forms storytelling and invention take in literature, with emphasis on the novel and film. We will interrogate the act of creating fictions, and the impact a fictional world can make on a reader. Along the way, we will continually consider two deceptively simple questions: what does fiction do to us? What can fiction do for us?

This course studies the entanglement between ideas of personhood and the history of ideas about beauty. How does beauty make and unmake persons -socially, legally and culturally- at the intersection of race, gender and aesthetics? Let us move beyond the good versus bad binary that dominates discussions of beauty to focus instead on how beauty in literature and culture have contributed to the conceptualization of modern, western personhood and its inverse (the inhuman, the inanimate, the object). We will trace beauty and its disruptions in the arenas of literature, visual culture, global capitalism, politics, law, science and technology.

This interdisciplinary course offers a broad introduction to the study of Irish literature, history and culture. Students will gain a grounding in: Irish storytelling since the early Christian period, including through music and song; the history of the conquest of Ireland and Irish independence movements; the role of the Irish language in culture; the famine and its social and political aftermath; the history of religious difference; the relationship between Britain and Ireland; the work of major literary figures such as Swift, Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and Heaney; contemporary Ireland and the Irish economy.

How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.

This course explores the intimate relationship between literature, fashion, and various modes of self-fashioning and unfashioning. We will study novels, films, and photography that highlight the relationship among material histories, social fabrics, and notions of the corporeal and the human. Along the way, we will unsettle the easy yet stubborn distinction between surface and interiority.

If we remember one thing about ancient myths, it is not to read them literally: Icarus didn't really fall into the sea because he flew too close to the sun. In this class, we will explore the frequently contentious debates about how to interpret myth as they played out in Europe from about 1500-1750. As we shall see, writing about myths ("mythography") mattered to the early moderns as a powerful way of making arguments about topics including politics, philosophy, religion, science, and sexuality. We will consider the histories of literature, ideas, and visual art, and treat authors ranging from Boccaccio and Machiavelli to Milton and Newton.

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 2023. 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.

What is literary theory and how does it allow us to think language and power in concert with categories of representation that exceed language: race, gender, coloniality, ecology, and subjectivity? This course will introduce students to literary theory, exploring how to read theory and how it helps us read other texts. We will consider the synergy between theories of signification and contemporary feminist, critical race, and postcolonial interventions. We will ground our analyses within particular literary, visual, and theoretical works, learning how to read cultural production as theory, rather than "applying" theory to selected texts.

This course studies some of the "greatest hits." We will read the most popular and influential texts in the history of "theory," defined here as philosophically informed, often politically committed modes, of interpreting everything from books, statues, buildings, cereal boxes, and historical catastrophes. We will study authors you hear a lot about but perhaps never had the opportunity to study in depth, much less in one setting: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Arendt, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Fanon, Derrida, and Jameson.

The dazzling and problematic figure of Arthur embodies the catastrophes and desires that propel medieval narratives, theories of power, ethnic divisions, and the emergence of the nation state. Arthurian literature asks us to think about how and why we read it now. Is it a guilty pleasure, serious critical work, or both? What do we learn from its mingled utopianism, nostalgia for the past, xenophobia, spectacle, sexuality, religion, violence, and political philosophy? The course will focus on the most influential medieval versions, but will include films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and 2021's The Green Knight.

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.

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems represent the subject and object of desire, and how do they represent the ethics of the erotic encounter? What is the social, political, and philosophical work of a personal and intimate poetry? Alongside a wide range of poems (including at least one contemporary collection placed in dialogue with the earlier poems), the course will include several short theoretical readings on the representation of desire.

The Romantic era witnesses a revolution in literary styles and subjects during an age of revolutions...American, French, and heated debates about the rights of men, of women, and the atrocity of the slave trade, and amid, within, and across this, the vital power of imagination. Our study shall be literary aesthetics, formations, and practices, and consideration of ethical thought and moral values. In conflicts of judgment, and how we organize our lives together, writing is a powerful medium of negotiation and reflection. The syllabus invites you to engage its texts along these lines--in conversations, informal postings, and formal essays.

This course will look to understand the current and historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in both Western culture and in American culture more specifically, the material effects of such representations and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people, and work toward developing ways of supporting Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It will include a cross-disciplinary program of learning that will work closely with the Indigenous holdings in both Firestone Library and the Princeton Art Museum.

This course surveys the literature from one of the most exhilarating and fraught periods in American history. From 1820 -1860, the United States was a fledgling new nation struggling to forge an identity distinct from Europe and a nation collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The ideals of freedom and democracy were promised to all but systematically undermined by white supremacy, chattel slavery, and settler colonialism. We explore artistic flourishing through transcendentalism, the critique of the American experiment by Black and Indigenous authors, and literature of reform, culminating on the eve of the American Civil War.

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 wilderness tale is one of North America's most enduring literary genres. Stories of misfortune, hardship, and heroism in the continent's untamed landscapes have long entertained readers with both the romance and the realism of human encounters with the wild. This diverse literary tradition encompasses survival sagas, adventure tales, exploration thrillers, pioneer stories, escape fantasies, and animal yarns. What exactly is wilderness, and how have American and Canadian fiction writers shaped our thinking about the wild?

The Bible created and divided the world. This course explores that deep history by examining how the Bible itself was shaped: when, how, and by whom it was written; how it recorded and reworked history; how it responded to and changed politics and culture; how it gave birth to the way we read everything today. No experience with literature or the Bible is necessary. Short exercises will show how to read translations closely, and how to work with the original Hebrew and Greek versions.

Why not say what you mean? As a mode of literary representation, allegory forces readers to do a lot of work. Sometimes allegory is a system of signifiers that corresponds to "real" things. At other times, allegory creates layers of simultaneous possible meanings, the divergence--even contradiction--of which frustrates arrival at any clear "point." In this course, we will ask: What is allegory? How does it create meaning? How do readers read it? Why do authors turn to allegory for particular projects at particular moments in history?

This course will think about how gothic texts represent haunting - the haunting of history, of racial and sexual violence, of the "other," of the non-human, of oneself. We will consider how fragments, encryptions, multiple narrators, for example, attempt to represent the persistence of the unspeakable. Our course will ponder why and how the gothic challenges, disrupts, resists, and yet also sometimes reinforces the tenets of authority. Although our course will proceed in a loosely chronological way, we will afford generous time to modern treatments, as we consider the development of gothic in memoir, graphic novels, music videos, and movies.

In received tradition there are no women authors writing in English before the very late 17th century, with a very few notable exceptions in the middle ages. This course charts the recovery and revaluation of early modern poetry by women, and contrasts it with verse by men, some of it well known. We'll learn how distinctively good it is, how unusually enjoyable and enlightening, as we encounter poems that range from recording the harrowing loss of grown-up daughters to smallpox to bold, insightful political verse. We'll follow the detective work that uncovered this lost poetry, and how the internet has been used to make it known.

Is comedy necessary? What calls for comedy? Why does comedy often deal with topics that we think are no laughing matters? When does comedy become obsolete, and how do new comedic voices and figures emerge? We will look at comedies from various historical periods (ancient to contemporary), cultural traditions, and artforms (drama, fiction, film, stand-up). We will study their conventions, plots, props, jokes, and running gags (both physical and verbal) and also read theoretical writings on comedy as we consider its perils and promises.

The "art of losing isn't hard to master," writes Elizabeth Bishop in "One Art". We'll examine that art of representing what we've lost, or longed for, in songs of transience and yearning that are brilliant, painful constructions in Old English. What could be mourned, who could grieve, how console? By methods comparative and critical, we will read how these poets of the earliest stage of English comprehended, maybe even mastered, their losses.

In conjunction with University College London, this course will examine texts about and set in London--novels, plays, poems, films, and essays--from the 19th century to the present, to address interrelated topics, including the roles of class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and performance in the social dynamics and geography of London life. By attending to the texts in their historical contexts and in relation to one another, we will explore writing about London that is as varied as the city itself. In addition, students will develop junior papers or senior theses, working collectively on their writing and reporting on their research.

Early modern vernacular writers did not simply imitate classical antiquity or later Italian or French verse as if it were ancient, but traded verse horizontally and multilaterally. Languages faded into one another though proximity, trade and war. We explore this cross-lingual, transnational literary field through the poetry of diplomats, colonists, itinerant prophets and pharmacists, and the work of traveling theater companies. The Netherlands is the polyglot hub for much of this activity, but we also chart rising interest in English beyond the British Isles, and tackle how we can think of an early modern global literature.

Silences, blind spots, absences: institutional archives are often characterized by what they stifle, obscure, or lack. So what kind of work is done by Black archives, which do not take their institutional presence for granted and often take shape in extra-institutional sites? In this survey of Black archival thought, we identify the practices that writers, artists, and scholars have used to create their own sites of memory and meaning-making. Through discussion and Special Collections workshops, we investigate how Black archives urge a rethinking of our ethical, epistemological, and affective relations to historical and documentary evidence.

We could consider all poetry as "nature poetry" in that poems have a relation, beyond aesthesis alone, to the boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In this course, we think about nature not only as a theme in poetry, but as well as a force in its practice. We take up such issues as the non-semantic and counter-logical, theories of rhythm, representations of the invisible, the temporal, the causal, and the sociology of genres.

Realism, even at its 19th-century apex in Great Britain and the US, always had a vexed relationship with neighboring novelistic genres. Present-day theoretical and critical debates on realism's limits and affordances (Jameson, Ranciere, Gallagher, Moi, Woloch et al.) allow us to explore, taxonomize and theorize a half-century-long contact zone. Canonical realist fiction (Gaskell, Eliot) shapes and is shaped by sensation (Wilde), naturalism (Twain and Hardy), fantasy (Jefferies), horror and the supernatural (Chesnutt), "scientific romance" (Wells), the "verse novel" (Meredith). Culminates with realist-adjacent Modernism (Ford, Woolf).

Exploiting the homonymic play between "red" and "read," this course considers the relations between political engagement and different forms of activist literacy. In what way are reading and writing a means of doing political work? Why is it that, in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser famously insists that "only since Marx have we had to begin to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means"? Analyzing writings by, among others, Marx, Luxemburg, Benjamin, Du Bois, and Jameson, we will think of how sentences are inseparable from the possibility of mass formations, insurrectionary politics, and collective action.

What accounts for the power and pleasure of storytelling? This course examines both the story and the telling. Likely topics include oral and written, original and adaptation, telling and retelling, audience and address, enchantment and magic, fascination and fear, trust and trickery, and truth and fiction. Our test cases take us from classical storytelling in The Odyssey, through fairy tales, folk tales, and their contemporary afterlives. We also prioritize pedagogical practice: students team-teach some class sessions, as well as submit lesson plans and sample syllabi in lieu of traditional research papers.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist, queer, and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

This seminar introduces the digital humanities by exploring key debates around the meaning of humanities data. Like "slow food"--a movement where diners, farmers, and chefs rethink what and how we produce and consume--we will explore data as local, embedded, and requiring careful critical reflection. How can computational tools help us to understand art and literature? What do digital archives reveal (or obscure) about the people who make them? We will explore the foundations of this field while also discussing concerns that emerge when accessing and maintaining digital projects in time and across global and local contexts.

This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse - but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.

In 1919, at the age of twenty, Vladimir Nabokov fled "the bloated octopus of state" of his native Russia and embarked on a dazzling bilingual literary career in emigration. This course focuses on Nabokov's masterly writing, which reflects a modernist preoccupation with narrative, temporality, and memory. The Russian and American novels are at the center of our attention, but readings include also a sampling of his shorter fiction, poetry, essays on literature, and the memoir Speak, Memory.

Theater relies on the physical and emotional vulnerability of live bodies to experience the pity and terror that plague, war, systemic injustice, and more ordinary forms of disease and death inflict. As we face the twin pandemics of our own time, what can "plague drama" (prompted by outbreaks of typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, AIDS, etc.) tell us about how writers use literal and metaphorical diseases to give shape to a given cultural moment? We'll look at a wide variety of mostly theatrical texts to explore how playwrights use the medium of the theater to literally embody and thus make visible physical, social, and metaphysical "dis-ease".

Since he burst onto the theatre scene with The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, Martin McDonagh has produced some of the most vivid, but also some of the most controversial work in contemporary drama and cinema. His plays and films are violent, lurid, transgressive and often grotesque, yet they also lend themselves to performances of great subtlety and sensitivity, like Frances McDormand's in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. We explore McDonagh's extreme imagination, its roots in Irish Gothic, Grand Guignol, the Grimm Brothers, Antonin Artaud and the theatre of the absurd and its uncomfortable use of race and disability.