This course examines the selected non-fiction writings of one of America's most influential essayists and public intellectuals: James Baldwin. Attention will be given to his views on ethics, art, and politics--with a particular consideration given to his critical reflections on race and democracy.

In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary Black speculative fiction and Black studies scholarship to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to interrogate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about Black worlds. The course argues that speculative writing-narrative fiction and theoretical writing-gesture to other social and political modes of thinking about and being in the world.

A survey of 20th- and 21st-century African American literature, including the tradition's key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature fits into certain periods and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts.

This course we will undertake the deceptively simple question: how do we read Toni Morrison? In taking up this task, we will devote our attention to various scenes and sites of reading across Morrison's oeuvre, asking how Morrison is encouraging us to read history, slavery, violence, geography, time, space, gender, and friendship. We will also engage with Morrison's own status as a reader by considering her work as an editor and literary critic. Through regular engagement with the Toni Morrison Papers housed at Firestone we will consider what it means to be able to read Morrison in such close proximity to these archival materials.

In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.

Why did three American genres become classics in the same twenty-year period, 1936-1956? Part of the answer lies in global disruptions that unsettled codes of behavior. Part lies in film innovations that altered cinema itself. But more than this intersection of social and formal transformations, the decisive answer lies in a handful of directors who reconfigured gendered relations in three generic forms. The surprising correspondences that emerge among these classic films, if also the obvious divergences even within single genres, that will focus our discussion.

In-depth look into current US issues, with emphasis on democracy and the question 'What is America?'-socially, culturally, politically. Seminar immerses students into nonfiction literature, particularly as it illuminates the idea of "America" and the state of "Americans". Together we explore seminal non-fiction writing about America, the better to hone students' ability to think and write critically about the public sphere, and to write intelligently about their lives. Seminar examines how major writers, and students, best integrate research, socio-political analysis, literary skill, to craft publicly valuable, self-revelatory writing.

Creation stories from Turtle Island foreground an integral connection between land and story. "Sky Woman Falling" contains key ecological and environmental knowledge. This course explores the relationship between land and story, emphasizing seeds as sources of sovereignty and repositories of knowledge across generations. We focus on Native New Jersey while understanding the history of this land in the context of global indigeneity and settler colonialism. Course literature engages seeds, land, and the environment from a perspective that crosses the disciplines of American studies, literature, history, ecology, and environmental studies.

The seminar takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life's frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life's irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility?

This course will focus on the Asian American arts, culture and youth activist movements in New York City from the early 1970s-1990s. Invited guest speakers--filmmakers, visual and literary artists--will engage with students in talk-story, bridging their cultural practices to present day. We will examine how Asian Americans used their struggle for self-determination and talents to build art, literary and independent film organizations and the projects that they have produced. Students will have the opportunity to produce a creative final project based on oral history interviews with members of Asian American organizations.

Students will collaborate with legal scholar Patricia Williams, literary historian Autumn Womack, and guest artists and performers to creatively explore the theatrical and performative archives that animate what we'll understand as black (gendered) legal performances. We will investigate a range of sites - from the Margaret Garner trial to Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing - and the embodied, visual and sonic histories that score them. Alongside filmmakers, visual artists, and performers, students will construct a multi-modal creative record that fills in the silences and supplements the noise that accompanies these trials.

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.

Why have so many masters of verbal art relied on the stylistics and epistemologies of jazz musicians for the communication of experience and disruption of conventional concepts? We'll draw on musical recordings, live in-class performances by guest jazz artists, poetry, fiction, and recent debates in jazz studies, critical theory and Black studies. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of literature and/or music are welcomed, but proficiency in both disciplines is NOT required. We will develop together techniques of close reading and listening. Optional performance component for music instrumentalists and vocalists.

Recontextualizing the `Rise of the Novel': We revisit dominant Anglocentric accounts of the novel's origins in a wider European context, reading 17th-18th century fiction & criticism; reconsider "the novel" as a narrative epistemology of character competing with other genres (history, romance, drama); trace its development from a hybrid of earlier popular forms to an established literary genre, now the predominant one, in response to profound shifts in conceptions of gender, identity, literature, probability, sensibility, epistemology, the rise of the middle class, the nuclear family, industrialism, individualism, and colonialism.

This seminar explores the confluences among Japanese, Black, and Indigenous thought in both creative and critical modalities. Through the uncharted encounters among Pacific and Caribbean discourses of ecological reimagining, the course surfaces the generative potentials of a planetary and comparative humanities. Participants develop creative/critical engagements with diverse scholarly approaches and collaborative experimentations with textual, audio-visual, and place-based forms of expression. Together, we trace the speculative archipelagoes that sound out shared but disparate genealogies of anti-colonial inquiry.

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?

The 21st century has seen many Greek classics re-told in ways that challenge dominant power structures. We will analyze some of these new versions of old stories while interrogating the very idea of a 'classic'. Why re-tell a story from over 2,000 years ago to begin with? What are the politics of engaging with texts that have been used to underpin ideas of a superior Western civilization? What challenges do writers have to overcome in working with ancient texts? Students will consider these questions as readers but also as writers who will work towards a classics re-write of their own.

This course offers a survey of the varieties of animation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as their critical reception. Animation is a ubiquitous form, present across media and in advertising. Many viewers take its components and effects for granted. But the archive of animation fundamentally complicates any easy assumptions about "realism" in the twentieth century; animation, moreover, challenges assumptions about bodies and their functions, exaggerating their features and functions, promoting alternatives to more mundane notions of life and liveliness, and relatedly, to ideas of time, contingency, and experience.

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.

An introduction to the forms and meanings of American television, with an emphasis on watching, thinking, and writing critically about the medium. We will examine a range of structures, styles, and strategies specific to television, including episodic storytelling, the advent of streaming and "peak TV," and the role of television in establishing and sometimes disrupting norms of identity, politics, and aesthetics. The main approach throughout will be close analysis of specific genres, series, and episodes informed by the histories, contexts, and practices that make American television such a significant part of American culture.

John Milton's writings reflect a lifelong effort to unite the aims of political, intellectual and literary experimentation. 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 Samson. We'll encounter Milton's startling poetic innovations, his controversial ideas about sovereignty, marriage and God, and we will consider Milton's writings in relation to other genres, from late antique theology and medicine to much more recent sci-fi and crime fiction.

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 offer a survey of UK popular cinema from the 1920s to the present. We will investigate how this cinema tradition addresses questions of national identity and history: in the aftermath of the British Empire, what is England? How can popular cinema offer critique and reevaluation of social and economic crises? We will also trace the relationship between British cinema and Hollywood, from the origins of both of these national industries, through international obsessions like the Bond films, the unexpected success of Working Title rom coms of the 90s, and the influence of indie classics like Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting".

Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean Literature: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt. These past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean in ways that necessitate attention to gender, race, and environment.

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience and our shared lifeworld. The course is based on the insights and methods of phenomenology, though our readings will draw from literature, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, and medical humanities. We will proceed with the conviction that the best way to learn phenomenology is by practicing it, and the semester will be divided between textual study of perception and an experimental practicum in which students observe and record their own habits of perception. Instead of a final paper, students will produce an original phenomenology of an object, a place, or an event.

This course asks whether our tendency to think space via language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, and the condition of "being in time" is useful or exhaustive. This class is an experiment in what it means to "be" in space, inhabit a place.

The topic of the "book" can be opened in many ways. This seminar investigates the book's plangent materiality: its claims on timelessness, its transience. Through keyholes in space and time, we'll discuss how the book has changed, how it produces visual and readerly processes, and how it instantiates the persistent trope of the "page". Books have social lives too, and we'll examine grand medieval books and inspect the micrographic doodles on a page's margins that are parts of the textual cultures and communities of books. Attention will be paid to book collectors' books and to collections of books, like libraries and archives.

The short story reveals narrative at its most succinct, stripped bare (or rather contained within indispensable parts). Often viewed as insufficient novels, stories expose more fully the possibilities of narrative itself in revealing the flashes of character, lyricism, comedy, voice, coincidence, even fate that shape all fictional forms. This course examines the development of the American short fiction over two centuries, revealing its extraordinary variety and complexity.

This course looks for the origins of the modern world - and the unrealized alternatives to its trauma and inequity - in medieval travelogues, histories, and poetic fictions. We will trace ideologies of race, religious difference, and colonialism as they emerged. At the same time, the works we will read belonged to a world radically different from the modernity to come: the medieval literary imagination can surprise with both its beauty and its sense of justice. Readings include work by Ibn Fadlan, Geoffrey Chaucer, and The Book of John Mandeville, as well as theory and criticism from Carolyn Dinshaw, Cedric Robinson, and Sylvia Wynter.

How does political upheaval - especially in the form of revolution - shape memoir? This course focuses on the work of writers, particularly those of Middle Eastern origin who live in the Americas (Mexico, the United States, and Cuba) to explore this question. It pairs their memoirs with other examples of their writing (letters, eulogies, and essays) and artistic production to study issues of post-coloniality, gender, race, and nationalism.

This seminar focuses exclusively on books of poetry published in 2022 and 2023. We'll read and discuss work by established and emerging poets, and attend poetry readings. Poets will also visit the class to discuss their work and the work of their influences. Students will write reviews, rather than essays, and in the process learn about (and contribute to) the contemporary poetry world.

This class will investigate William Shakespeare's play Hamlet through discussion and performance. Students will explore and rehearse an adaptation of the play to understand Shakespearean characters, narrative, and language, and to consider the play's resonance in the current moment. The class will culminate in workshop performances at the LCA during reading period. Students must be able to commit to group rehearsals outside of the official class time, working with a student assistant director and a faculty acting coach, in addition to faculty member Professor Wolff.

This course will focus on two "representative men" of the nineteenth century. It will propose that Emerson and Douglass are two of America's greatest defenders, precisely because they are its greatest mourners. While they point to America's unfulfilled promise of universal representation, they seek to realize it in their own acts of writing. This course attends to these writers' relations to the period's broader discourses surrounding race, ecology, empire, and nation-building. Alongside Emerson and Douglass, we will read short texts by naturalists, politicians, and activists such as J.B. Lamarck, James Madison, and Ida B. Wells.

Inter-disciplinary class on early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) when the city was at the center of the global economy and leading cultural center; home of Rembrandt and Spinoza (Descartes was nearby) and original figures like playwrights Bredero and Vondel, the ethicist engraver Coornhert, the political economist de la Court brothers and English traveling theater. We go from art to poetry, drama, philosophy and medicine. Spring Break is in Amsterdam with museum visits, guest talks and participation in recreation of traveling theater from the period.

The Romantic period, spanning from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Reform era of the 1830s was an age of revolutions in multiple registers, on multiple fronts: political, poetical, polemical, cultural. Our course engages some of the excitements in the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas DeQuincey. Our focus is on literary actions, reactions, formations and reforms, and risks and adventures, in the context of the age's ferments: the rights of man, or woman; abolitions polemics; and imagination's innovations.

The course invites us to think of borderlands where law and poetry intersect. What the law excises in its pursuit of justice, poetry cherishes as essential. Within a global context of literature we ask: how do the many and varied mother tongues of poetry that will not be silent confront the law's exorbitant capacities through which human becomes chattel and homeland wasteland? What does it mean to live in landscapes made forensic through the legacy of unlawful acts carried out under colour of law? In the poetiX of justice, X marks the place/s where crime jostles with evidence, history and memory as well as the unknown--the terrain of poetry.

The course attempts at once to isolate the distinctive character of modernist life writings and locate them within a specific cluster of psychological concerns and historical/social/cultural preoccupations. We explore how our writers/biographers defined their relation to their familial as well as cultural past; how they devised untraditional and singular forms to represent their own experience or those of their chosen subjects; how they shouldered their burdens as self-chroniclers or historians of loss, especially of self-loss.

This course explores the material and metaphysical conflation between Asiatic persons and Asiatic things in Western aesthetic and cultural imagination. How does the technologies of material nova from the discovery of Chinese porcelain in the 14th century to the invention of cybernetics in the 21st century shape the artisanal project of race and gender making for Asian Americans? What does it mean to survive as an object?

This class engages with spatial analysis across a range of disciplines and approaches; from architecture, architectural theory and manifestos to continental philosophy, Marxism, Black studies, decolonial writings, and a sample of graphic- and novelistic depictions of built space. We ask whether thinking about built space as a "language" is fundamentally different from "picturing" space or inhabiting space with our bodies, and whether these approaches count as "cognitive mapping." We contemplate the dystopian actualities and utopian possibilities inherent in the built environment and the constructive projects of world building.

This for-credit class combines making books with the study of books as fruit of all sorts of labor. Meeting in Firestone's Special Collections, students learn how to set type, print with an historic Albion Press, and hand-sew chapbooks of poems written by English Department poets, with the guidance of printer David Sellers. Seminars begin with presentations about books in Special Collections, from the Gutenberg Bible up to modernist little magazines and modern book arts.

New Schools surveys experiments in para- and counter-institutional higher education over the last century, from Black Mountain to Outer Coast to Deep Springs. Why do experimental schools arise, flourish, fossilize, fail? What are the epistemic, social, and political implications of departures from pedagogical norms? We approach these new schools as historians, critics, and teachers (and students); we study their records, try their methods, and we may well build our own. The seminar responds to the crisis of opportunity in higher education and to the perpetual call for new ways to teach and learn.

Required weekly seminar for all English Department PhD students teaching for the first time at Princeton and scheduled to precept during the Spring 2023 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.

The modern European novel has been haunted by the accusation of illegitimacy. From its eighteenth-century inception onward, the uncomfortable place of the novel among the poetic genres inherited from antiquity has solicited an unparalleled intensity of critical reflection. This course examines several 'classical' and contemporary meditations on the novel, alongside close consideration of three representative early examples. We will probe the uses and disadvantages of generic distinctions at the intersection of literary history and literary theory.

One is not born, but becomes, woman. So writes Simone deBeauvoir in The Second Sex, her landmark work of feminist philosophy. But how do we become women, anyway? And what if we don't? In this course we will read The Second Sex in its entirety, exploring Beauvoir's ideas - and our own - about childhood, family, sexuality, abortion, relationships, work, and aging. We will read Beauvoir alongside the work of her primary interlocutors (Hegel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) as well as contemporary feminist and trans theory, memoir, and fiction (Claudia Rankine, Carmen Maria Machado, Katharina Volckmer) considering gender and its discontents.

This seminar introduces students to basic concepts of working with literary texts and working with data. Crossing the divisional boundaries of literary analysis and quantitative and computational reasoning, we'll learn how to develop a compelling research question, to explore the many methodologies for using computation to analyze literature, and to put our work in context of the long history of literature conceived of as data. We'll think broadly about the role of humanities in data science, and learn the importance of interpretation, exploration, iteration, creativity, analysis, and critique in both literary and quantitative work.

In this course students will be reading works from the Latinx literary canon as a survey of diverse Latinx voices. Through the course theme, students will examine how select Latinx authors write about community, identity, race, gender, resistance, and culture in a manner that captures The Latinx Experience. Selected texts will showcase how home is contested as their characters navigate their lives 'here' and 'there' via notions of diaspora, migration, and belonging, languages, and borders. This course analyzes Latinx literary works, including the course novels, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Sabrina & Corina, and The House on Mango Street.

This course explores the many different ways in which the whole idea of a distinctively Irish theatre has been transformed every few decades, from Wilde and Shaw's subversions of England, to the search of Yeats and Synge for an authentic rural Ireland, to the often angry critiques of contemporary Ireland by Murphy, Friel and Carr. Plays of the Irish diaspora (O'Neill and McDonagh) are examined in this context. The course will also explore the ways in which ideas of physicality and performance, including the popular spectacle of Riverdance, have conflicted with and challenged Irish theatre's peculiar devotion to poetic language.