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.

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, stage production or two, and related visual texts.

This course provides a critical overview of the writings of Toni Morrison. Close reading, cultural analysis, intertextuality, social theory and the African American literary tradition are emphasized.

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.

Short stories have been used by writers to make concise, insightful comments about American national identity and individuality. Taken up by African-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and many others, the genre has been used to convey experiences with immigration and assimilation, discrimination and oppression, generational divides, and interactions across difference. Examination of such stories deepens our understanding of America's multiethnic landscape. In this seminar, we will explore stories written by a diverse group of writers to consider the ties that both link and divide multiethnic America.

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.

Autobiographies by writers of color are a contradictory form: a site of representation whose individualism can elide a portrait of the broader community. This class looks at Asian American autobiographies as a lens for issues of immigration, colonialism, and Asian American political mobilization. We will read oral histories, samizdat forms (zines/comics), and transnational works that challenge what it means to be "Asian" or "American" literature, such as Arab and Indo-Caribbean memoirs. We will work on in-class writing exercises and a zine to foster a sense of the autobiography as a model of self-fashioning.

While there is no single definition of socialism, the class introduces the historic diversity of socialist thinking. We ask: What is the "social" in socialism? How does socialism relate to communism and capitalism? How does it define democracy, equality, freedom, individuality, and collectivity? Are socialist ethics connected to religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that teach human equality? How may we understand injustices committed in socialism's name alongside its striving for social justice? We read classic texts of socialist theory and practice to reveal its roots in literature and philosophy as well as social movements.

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.

The idea that the poet "created a world" was a commonplace of Renaissance literary criticism. In this course we will be thinking about how poetry's worldmaking powers responded to changing ideas of what makes up the world - from revolutionary visions of the cosmos to new conceptions of the nature of matter and life - as well as to the new technologies which made these discoveries possible. How do the "creative" qualities of literature interact with an emerging scientific emphasis on facts and "things as they are"? We will consider these and similar questions in the different contexts of early modern Italy and England.

The advent of the Internet shut down the feminist "Porn Wars" debates 25 years ago, yet created conditions of possibility for a recent revival of debate on pornography at the intersections of philosophy, literary theory and history, social science, legal studies, and gender studies. At stake, beyond gender and sexual politics, are the broader politics of representation, dissemination, and "speech." We address these by discussing works from multiple fields, emphasizing literary studies and philosophy. Readings, beyond those listed below, include essays by G.S. Rubin, K.A. MacKinnon, N. Strossen, A. de Botton, J.J. Fischel, and S. Zizek.

Bernard Stiegler's (1952-2020) writing is driven by the question of technology in the longue durée of social development, philosophical speculation, and political economy. In an unprecedented elaboration of the implications of understanding the human as a technical entity, Stiegler confronts predicaments concerning practices of education, transformations of "disruptive" capitalism, effects of computational automation on employment, the psyche and the capacity for reason, and the outlook for a world defined by the anthropocene. We read Stiegler's most important work and relevant philosophical and topical texts (from Plato to Greta Thunberg).

Through a comparative focus on the concepts of dialectic and difference, we read some of the formative theoretical, critical and philosophical works which continue to inform interdisciplinary critical theory today. Works by Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Arendt, de Man and Benjamin are included among the texts we read.

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?

To know a poem well is to make it your own and to learn something about how poems are made. In this class you will learn many great poems well. You will learn about the techniques and history of this art form as we consider significant changes in the history of lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems and think about poets' uses of voice, diction, image, trope, form, occasion, sequence, and closure. We will be reading poems together and writing about them, making poems and imitations of our own, and learning poems by heart.

Why are we fascinated with the change from youth to adulthood? What features do stories about this period share, and how is this time in life imagined across time periods and genres? Together we will read novels, short stories, and contemporary memoirs that explore what it means to grow up, leave home, find adventure, encounter disappointment, return to one's origins, and reflect on what it means to change.

In this course we will read diverse approaches to science fiction that emerged across global postwar milieux, looking carefully at how science fiction poses fundamental ethical problems: What makes a world habitable? How do human beings live together? Does science fiction offer new parameters for thinking human morality or moralities beyond "humanity"? A key term throughout the course will be utopia, which has markedly different meanings in different political situations and which draws attention to competing visions of the good.

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 200-level 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.

King Arthur: the most dazzling and problematic figure of the Middle Ages. There is the strange mix of mysticism and a fascination with power, the idealism and betrayal, the narcissism and spectacle. Arthur is a problematic figure already in his own stories. But he is problematic in ways that are less obvious. Writers found in him an anticipation of later critiques of empire--the sexism, racism, and economic oppression that modern works place in the foreground ("I didn't vote for you," says a peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) We will read the important works of the Arthurian canon as well as watch a film and TV version or two.

This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx Literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.

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, and his ambition to produce a radically new conception of love that would transform lived experience. 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, and his highly controversial ideas about sovereignty, marriage and God.

Early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) was at the center of the global economy and a leading cultural center; inhabited by many British people and much discussed in English literature; 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.

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.

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.

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".

The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas - islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, we will explore questions of indigeneity, colonial contact, iterations of enslavement, and the plantation matrix in literary texts. How do island-writers evoke gender and a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction?

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 is a survey of classical and modern drama from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America. Topics will include Noh and Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Sanskrit theater, Nigerian masquerades and a variety of selections from the rich modern Indian and Latin American canons.

A course on multicultural London as a literary mecca for migrants and immigrants, especially those who came from former imperial colonies. We'll be reading poetry, fiction, and drama by 19th - 21st century writers such as Wordsworth, Byron, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Woolf, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith. Students will be trained to use digital tools-mapping, timelines, annotation, etc.- to compile an online archive/portfolio on a research topic of their interest. We'll have frequent visits by guest speakers involved with immigrant writers and populations in London, who will discuss with us their scholarship and practice.

How does Beowulf work as a poem? Who made up Beowulf, and what makes it up? We'll aim to reply to such queries, learning Beowulf through studying its manuscript context and its literary and historical milieux. Topics emphasized include the poem's genre; its sources, analogues, and afterlives; its place in theories of performance; its aesthetics; and its troubled relationship to our times and to "deep time". We'll read Beowulf in our now, as much as in the poem's then. Tune up your harp, sharpen your wits, and get set to explore a startling and crucial text.

Cultivating non-judgmental awareness and other kinds of embodied presence are considered crucial for recognizing and undoing many forms of domination, privilege, and injustice. 18C England reveals a complex history of disavowing embodied presence and non-judgmental awareness, instead privileging systems that monitor and dominate people and the spaces they inhabit. Through 18C novels, we attempt to recover awareness, and track its erasure. Our archive includes writing on 18C imperialism, migration and land-cultivation. The course incorporates some training in mindfulness, compassion practices and conscious breathwork.

What does it mean to read late-19th Century African American literature now? What critical questions does it answer, what methodological approaches does it demand, and what does it mean to ethically encounter the archive of postbellum black life and literature? We approach these questions by pairing deep readings of African American literature from the late 19th century with criticism that takes the period as its starting point. We read canonical and lesser known texts as sites from which race, freedom, aesthetics, performance, and the archive itself are being theorized, while also exploring how those very ideas might instruct us now.

Nineteenth-century American poetry is rarely invoked in current debates about the theory and history of "the lyric." The all-White Shelley-to-Stevens, British-Romanticism-to-American-Modernism narrative of the history of Anglophone poetry is still so common that this absence has gone unnoticed. In this seminar, we read current lyric theory against the racialized background of the nineteenth-century American poetics that turned a variety of popular verse genres (ballads and hymns, odes and epistles, elegies and drinking songs) into a lyricized idea of poetry, that replaced the genre of the poem with the genre of the person.

A Janus-faced encounter with the early modern essay, centering on Montaigne and Bacon, looking back to the ancients (Seneca, Plutarch) and forward to our contemporaries (Koestenbaum, Tolentino, et al.). The written work of the course takes the forms of imitation and analysis: we try on the styles of the essayists we read, working towards essays of our own. We also experiment with different ways of knowing and translating the form and spirit of the genre, including essays in film, music, and dance.

How does the history of literary criticism have an impact upon the practice of criticism today? What are the enduring central questions that critics bring to their work and, indeed, what is the essence of that work? Our seminar immerses us in these issues. The course is designed for graduate students who would like to think deeply about their practice as critics and to explore the history of criticism as a resource for new writing.

This course asks questions about interdisciplinarity in relation to professional structures of recognition. We analyze prize-winning monographs which were "first books," first, to begin to build our own toolkits, and second to explore which works become "prize-winning." The "firstness" of our books is a point of departure, even as we place them in genealogies: theoretical, critical, archival. We ask: what is interdisciplinarity in each book and over time? what methods carry over between fields? what makes books 'field-defining'?

Taking our point of departure from Walter Benjamin's artwork essay, we trace the way in which photographers and artists from the late 1970s to the present have asked us to understand their work as resources for doing political work, as strategies of resistance and activism, as even training manuals on how to engage, rethink, and address some of the most urgent issues of our time. We consider works by, among others, Susan Meiselas, Allan Sekula, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Alfredo Jaar, Marcelo Brodsky, Walid Raad, Taryn Simon, Nikos Pilos, Isaac Julien, Claudia Andujar, and Fazal Sheikh.

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, history and case history, and truth and fiction. Our test cases take us from classical storytelling in The Odyssey, through fairy tales and folk tales, to the modern form of the novel. 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.

This interdisciplinary seminar in the environmental humanities explores imaginative and political responses to unequal access to resources and unequal exposure to risk during a time of widening economic disparity. To engage these concerns, we venture to India, Japan, the Caribbean, South Africa, Kenya, the U.S., India, Cambodia, and Bolivia. Issues we address include: the interface between climate justice and social justice; water security, deforestation, the commons, Indigenous movements, the environmentalism of the poor, the gendered and racial dimensions of environmental justice and more-than-human environmental justice.

Required weekly seminar for all English Department PhD students teaching for the first time at Princeton and scheduled to precept during the Spring 2021 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); teaching online and best practices for remote learning; writing recommendations; and managing students, faculty, and time.

How and why has literary criticism relied on or resisted quantitative methods? In this seminar we survey current debates about evidence, Digital Humanities and cultural analytics and discuss methods of evaluating data as evidence across disciplines. Using approaches from data feminism, critical archival studies, and Data for Black Lives, we think about traditional objects of literary study: the book, the text, the poem, the artwork, as data with a complicated past and future. How might humanities and data together build more equitable ways of knowing?

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?

This workshop will expose participants to some of the most dynamic, adventurous environmental nonfiction writers while also giving students the opportunity to develop their own voices as environmental writers. We'll be looking at the environmental essay, the memoir, opinion writing, and investigative journalism. In the process we'll discuss the imaginative strategies deployed by leading environmental writers and seek to adapt some of those strategies in our own writing. Readings will engage urgent concerns of our time, like climate change, extinction, race, gender and the environment, and relations between humans and other life forms.

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 engaging it in literature, arts and film. Students in the seminar will learn the environmental science and policy related to sea level rise. They will consider solutions being put forward to address the impacts, such as hard engineering (sea walls or artificial islands) or soft engineering (restoring coral or oyster reefs, mangrove marshes or wetlands). Additionally, students will engage literature, art and films by and about islanders and sea level rise.

Multi-disciplinary seminar focused on communicating climate science in the context of digital culture, with a specific focus on American journalism and social media. Course addresses a range of media - including documentary, the op-ed, data visualization, immersive storytelling, and virtual and augmented reality. Further considers the media culture and narrative strategies of communities leading movements for climate justice. Through individual and collaborative assignments, students test out different forms of science communication and experiment with crafting multimedia environmental stories informed by their research for public audiences.

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.

A so-called invisible city, Trenton is 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 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 a community-organized sculpture that was removed over "concerns" about "gang" culture. Students will conduct field interviews and work alongside dramatists and playwrights.

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.

Each week we'll take up a major theme--creation, the problem of evil; what's human/inhuman/ divine; apocalypse--and explore how their stories, embedded in western culture, have been interpreted for thousands of years--so far! Starting with creation stories from Babylon, Israel, Egypt and Greece, we'll consider how some such stories still shape an amazing range of cultural attitudes toward controversial issues that include sexuality, "the nature of nature," politics, and questions of meaning.

Horror has clawed its way into critical recognition, but continues to challenge our understandings of genre, technique, and the purpose of art. Diverse and often intertwined with the sibling phenomena of science fiction and fantasy, this paradoxical and often-reviled genre has persisted and evolved through the centuries. Why do we want to be scared, and how does horror scare us? In this course, students will develop their own approaches to reading, viewing, and understanding horror. The material will cover a variety of strains of horror in literature and film with a focus on originally Russian works. No knowledge of Russian is necessary.

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".

From the spirits and banshees of oral legends to Bram Stoker's Dracula, from the classic works of Yeats, Synge and Beckett to Garth Ennis's Preacher comics and Anne Rice's Vampire novels, Irish culture has been haunted by the Otherworld. Why has the Irish Gothic had such a long ghostly afterlife on page and stage? Can we learn something about modernist works like those of Yeats and Beckett by seeing them through the perspective of popular fictions of the supernatural?

Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the US and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision/deconstruct/rewrite/appropriate canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition. While their choices might be accused of recentering and reinforcing "white" narratives that often marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this risky 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 risks?

What we'll be writing together won't quite be art criticism and it won't quite be traditional historical writing either, what we'll be writing together is something more akin to poetry, fiction, art criticism and theory fused into a multivalent mass. Keeping in mind that language can hold many things inside of itself, we'll use somatic and idiosyncratic techniques as a lens, reading a range of poets, theorists, critics, writers and artists who are all thinking with art while writing about bodies, subjectivity, landscape, and the inimitable forms that emerge from the studio.