European Cultural Studies
- ART 455/VIS 455/ECS 456: Seminar in Modernist Art & Theory: Alienation in Modern Art & Literature"Alienation" is a primary concern of modern art and literature. This seminar explores some of its principal formulations by artists, writers, and philosophers over the last two centuries.
- ECS 362/MUS 362/SPA 362/COM 343: Opera: Culture and PoliticsThis course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.
- ECS 489/CHV 489/HUM 485/ENV 489: Environmental Film Studies: Research Film StudioThis transdisciplinary course investigates `home' as a central concept in both environmental studies (settler-colonial vs nomad) and arthouse cinema (anthropocentric vs environmental perspective). With the help of examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises, we will experiment with a possible compromise between the civilizational paradigms of settler colonialism vs nomadic homelessness.
- FRE 217/ECS 327/COM 258/URB 258: Revisiting ParisThe City of Light Beacons. Beyond the myth, however, this course proposes to look at the real "lives" of Paris. Focusing on the modern and contemporary period, we will study Paris as an urban space, an object of representation, and part of French cultural identity. To do so, we will use an interdisciplinary approach, through literature, history, sociology, art history, architecture, etc. To our understanding of its history and its making, we will actually travel to Paris. During Fall Break (Oct. 11-19), students will not only (re)visit the city, but also meet guest speakers and conduct personal projects they will have designed in Princeton.
- FRE 243/ECS 383: Literature and the Relational Self in Contemporary French ProseThis course focuses on developments of the past thirty years in French and francophone literature (the francophone component including Martinique, Guadeloupe, Senegal, Canada, and Vietnam). It examines especially-in contexts informed by issues of class, gender, race, migration, and generation-multiple ways in which a self is constituted and evolves in relation to other selves, to groups, and to history. The texts to be read include both fiction and nonfiction of an autobiographical inflection. Emphasis will be placed not only on substantive relational questions but also on the formal literary resources of which these authors make use.
- FRE 380/ECS 387: TechnophobiaEach new technology generates its own set of apprehensions, expressed through opinion pieces, literature, film, art, and public debates. This course surveys fearful responses to technologies such as print, electricity, radio, telegraph, telephone, photography, robots and automatons, the automobile, chemical warfare, the atom bomb, cloning, drones, IVF and technologies of reproduction, GMOs, mechanization, surveillance technologies, cell phones, the Minitel and Internet, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc. What patterns can be found in these fears? How have writers and artists channeled these in their work?
- GER 302/ECS 377: Topics in Critical Theory: Philosophy and the IrrationalThe interrogation of the irrational that was undertaken by German Critical Theorists in the aftermath of the Shoah has once again become deeply topical today. After reconstructing this critical discourse, the seminar will scrutinize the jargons of authenticity and interiority in a range of current cultural discourses, while adding new perspectives from feminist theory, new materialism, and aesthetics. By mobilizing the stylistic forms, vocabularies, and philosophical frameworks of critical theory, the seminar seeks to expose and understand the contemporary resurgence of the irrational.
- GER 372/ART 342/ECS 384: Writing About Art (Rilke and Freud)Can experiences of looking at works of art shape not only how we think and feel and see, but also what we understand ourselves to be, as human beings? Two great 20-c. writers, poet Rainer Maria Rilke and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, believed they could. How did Freud's inquiries into aesthetic experience and the ways artists perceive the world inform the development of psychoanalysis? What moved Rilke to transform his writing in light of what he saw in modern art? Course focuses on the significance of art, and of practices of writing about art, in lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural analysis.
- GER 402/ECS 401/GSS 457: Why Weimar Now? Material Culture and Historical Analogy"Weimar" stands in for a potential that was lost, for the problem of revolution and reaction. A century after the Weimar Republic's apex, we first pick up on the negative political analogy between pre-fascist Weimar and our time: the U.S. as a "new Weimar," "the crisis of parliamentary democracy," the rise of White Supremacy, the "agitator," and the danger of pluralization. Second, we will study the positive analogies between Weimar as an era for revolution and experimentation. Embracing the materiality of the body and the built world - in dance, architecture, sexuality studies, and social history - we also aim to dis-analogize Weimar.
- HUM 316/COM 313/ECS 374/ITA 316: Women in European Cinema: Gender and the Politics of CultureThis course will provide the historical and theoretical background essential for understanding the evolution of women's film in European cinema. Particular attention will be paid to questions of sexual difference and to the challenges feminist and queer theory pose to a politics of identity in film. Students will explore and assess the ways cultural identity determines the cinematic representation of women, while receiving a solid grounding in the poetics of cinema as it developed across time, genres, and cultures.