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.

This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film and also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

"What is a Classic?" asks what goes into the making of a classic text. It focuses on four, monumental poems from the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Gilgamesh, which are discussed through comparison across traditions, ranging as far as Chinese poetry. Students will consider possible definitions and constituents of a classic, while also reflecting on the processes of chance, valorization, and exclusion that go into the formation of a canon. Topics will include transmission, commentary, translation, religion, race, colonization, empire, and world literature.

This course places issues of migration and legacies of imperialism and settler colonialism in conversation with Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, confrontations, and allusive riffs in the present day. By looking at both early modern and 21st-century texts and cultural products that engage with patterns of mobility and migration (and the securitized nation-state) from the U.S/Mexico borderlands to the Mediterranean, as well as the many afterlives of Shakespeare in the present, we will explore the possibilities and risks of an activist literature of migration that draws from early modern dramatic precedent.

What is comparison, and what are its stakes? How do we compare across languages, genres, and/or media? How and why might we "read" closely, at a distance, historically, politically? What can we learn from engaging in and with translation(s)? This course incorporates readings and exercises that will get us out of our read-and-discuss comfort zone: we visit archival spaces on campus; explore data-driven projects in the digital humanities; engage in archival research; imagine collaborative, plurilingual projects that embrace broad histories of production and circulation; and experiment with translation, editing, and the creation of paratext.

What is the relationship between culture and ethics in conflict zones? Can culture serve as an agent of conflict resolution and social change, or does it deepen political divisions? How does art represent extreme violence? How do power and cultural interact? This course explores such questions through the lens of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We'll see how the conflict permeates everyday life, and how Palestinian and Israeli artists, writers and filmmakers respond. Course material includes film, fiction, memoir, visual art, music, TV satire, interactive websites, and cookbooks, all in English translation; course features guest speakers.

A seminar on magic speech, defined as performative language that does not so much describe reality as change it. Our subjects will range from spells and enchantments to blessings, curses, prayers and oaths. We will focus on medieval literature, philosophy, and theology; at the same time, we will discuss some contemporary perspectives on magic and speech acts in literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology. Attention will be paid to the Arabic, Scholastic, and vernacular traditions of medieval Europe.

For historical reasons most books that come into English are translated from just a few languages, creating a misleading impression of the spread of literature itself. This course provides an opportunity to discover literary works from languages with small reading populations which rarely attract academic attention in the USA. It also offers tools to reflect critically on the networks of selection that determine which books reach English-language readers; the role of literature in the maintenance of national identities; the role of translation; and the concept of "world literature" in Comparative Literary Studies.

This seminar will explore the perennial fascination with forms of narrative that purport to tell true stories about actual individual lives: biography and autobiography, memoir, diary, hagiography, and more. What is at stake, what can be gained by writers and readers from life writing in its various genres? Readings will be primarily European and American. We will read and discuss some theoretical works alongside the life writings themselves.

Why is film and TV so haunted - by ghosts, vampires, zombies, uncanny robots, and even screens themselves? Moving images evoked haunting since their invention in the 18th century. An inherently Gothic medium, film developed in tandem with Gothic literature, haunting the 21st century with the nightmares of the 18th. Why do they keep coming back? In the standard ghost story, something important has been lost or something left undone. What is the buried legacy or the cultural work unfinished that the 18th century Gothic mode keeps returning to perform? This is the question we will strive to answer by analyzing narratives in visual media.

Open to undergraduate and grad. students, this course investigates poetry and prose writings on poetry by major poets writing in 16th-19th cent. English, Spanish, and German, alongside critical texts on poetics. (Foreign language knowledge desired but not required.). Brief practica on the mechanics of poetics (meters, rhyme and stress patterns, and specific poetic forms) will be presented to assist us in our examination of texts. Figuration and representation, lyric syntax and experience, temporality, and materiality, are some of the critical subjects we will address. See prof. for full syllabus.

The demand to be yourself permeates many aspects of our culture. Identity has become a contemporary dogma of sorts. In this course, we will question this be-yourself mantra, and focus on what is most deeply human: attention and engagement with everything outside the self. Instead of identity, then, we will focus on impersonality, a concept explored and adopted by many artists, thinkers, and doctors to explain the point of their practice: becoming the other through fiction, observation, or empathy, and aiming towards something beyond the self's limited experience.

The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning now offers ample practical training and resources for improving classroom performance and building credentials for teaching jobs. This seminar instead explores the politics of pedagogical practice, through discussions of readings from various perspectives and time periods, as well as by sharing our own pedagogical experiences at Princeton and elsewhere. The reading list suggested here is a starting point; in an effort to de-hierarchize our own classroom, we develop a full reading list collaboratively. Graduate students from all departments are welcome.

Foucault argued that, starting at the end of 18th century, the object of power becomes biological life; politics becomes "biopolitics." He claimed that statistics plays a major role in that change. We explore those arguments, while testing a third: biopolitics takes as its object not so much real as probable lives. Starting with Pascal's "wager" on the afterlife and Leibniz's "palace of destinies," we discuss modern demographics, statistics as a political science, and later developments, from theories of civil safety to techniques for valuing (and devaluing) lives, exploring the ethical and political questions they raise.

This seminar familiarizes students with some of the fundamental theoretical, philosophical, and interpretive works on aesthetic formation, temporality, and the techne of sense-making from whose interrelation critical and dialectical literary, social, and media theory all continue to derive today. These include works by Diderot, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Austin, and Jakobson.

Intensive reading of Marx's Capital vol. 1. We read the work closely from beginning to end during the semester. Attention is paid to questions of translation. Knowledge of German is not required, but be prepared to engage with the German text. Secondary readings and other writings by Marx will be included as necessary.

The Writing and Dissertation Colloquium is a biweekly forum for graduate students in Comparative Literature to share works in progress with other graduate students. The seminar welcomes drafts of your prospectus, article, dissertation chapter, conference paper, exam statement and grant or fellowship proposal. The 90-minute sessions, done in conjunction with a rotating COM faculty member, are designed to offer written and oral feedback. The goal is to provide a space for students to share their work-in-progress and improve the writing and research skills. The reading materials are pre-circulated before each session.

Students teach a semester long undergraduate course in literature at an institution other than Princeton University. Objectives and content of the course are determined by the student's advisor in consultation with the host. The student enrolled in the course submits monthly progress reports that include the syllabus of the course taught, a description of the subject matter covered, of teaching methods employed, and of examinations conducted. The student also submits any course evaluations they may receive from the host institution. There are no exams and take-home exercises for this not-for-credit course.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 10-15 page sample, with commentary, of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 15-20 page sample, with commentary, of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

This course explores the work and life of poets across the Chinese-speaking world from the tumultuous twentieth century to the present. How does poetry adapt to the evolving media landscape and serve as a storage device for the events, experiences, and myths of modern China? How did poets transform crises--dynastic collapse, colonialism, national failure, revolution, war, displacement, state and mass violence, political repression, environmental calamity--into critical reflections on the diverse yet interconnected human condition? Concluding with a glimpse into the creativity of AI poets, we ask: why do humans still need poetry?

This seminar considers the issues of language, writing, and inscription in a broad comparative perspective that brings together critical theory and recent scholarship on Korea and East Asia. It traces the issues of language and inscription against the frameworks of semiology (Derrida, Irigaray), discursive order (Foucault, Kittler), folds of matter and power (Deleuze), and ideological control (Althusser). The class also uses this theoretical framework to build our understanding of Korean (and, when applicable, East Asian) writing systems, from calligraphy, to the development of print and digital culture. All readings available in English.

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.

This class considers Jane Austen not only as the inventor of the classic novel but also as an inspiring, ceaslessly discussable author who is--thanks to a steady stream of adaptations and spinoffs--our contemporary. Pairing each novel with recent adaptations and current issues, we will discuss how Austen treats love, violence, sisterhood, sex, and power. Exploring Austen's difference as well as her modernity, we will learn as much about ourselves as about her novels.

Epic poetry is like a blockbuster film (with war, sex, downfall, exaltation) and was considered "the best and most accomplished kind of poetry" in the Renaissance. Four-hundred years later, its greatest practitioners are rarely read. Our course aims to compensate for this neglect by immersing students in the greatest eddies of epic activity from two interrelated vantage points. First, Milton's Paradise Lost, that culmination of the entire (neo)classical epic tradition. And second, disability studies, which interrogates how certain physical and mental features (often coded as deviations from the able-bodied norm) become stigmatized.

A study of major plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett and others. Artists who revolutionized the stage by transforming it into a venue for avant-garde social, political, psychological, artistic and metaphysical thought, creating the theatre we know today.

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.

This course is on the challenges of thinking and writing about refugees from Africa and the Middle East to Europe in the 21st Century. The course will range across genres and platforms - journalism, fiction, and non-fiction creative writing. A central concern are the ethical, theoretical, and aesthetic problems presented by the condition of stateless. Why is the refugee story the most compelling contemporary story? How do we write about people who have been deprived of the security of geography, history, and rights? And how can people who are defined by placelessness and invisibility be made visible without compromising their humanity?

Beyond the myth of the City of Light, 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. And to deepen our understanding of its history and its making, we will take a mandatory trip to Paris. During Fall Break (Oct. 13-21), students will not only (re)visit the city, but also meet guest speakers and conduct personal projects they will have designed in Princeton.

This course focuses on the way literature, film, but also cultural events and spaces (circus, zoo, museum) present animals as objects of admiration and subjects of performance. We consider the fascination that animals inspire in humans, which might lead to question the distinction between "us" and "them". What is at stake, what are the consequences, for us and for them, when animals are seen or shown as an elusive Other who still beckons a closer encounter? How does the poetic power of language, or the evocative nature of images, affect their agency and our empathy, and eventually our mutual relationship?

What does it mean to have taste? How is it formed? How does it relate to fashion? How dependent is it on money and education? What are the connections between the aesthetic and moral parts of so-called "good taste"? Can there be a pure judgment of taste free from questions of social positioning? Is taste regarding design different from taste regarding art? Is there such a thing as a taste that turns against the logic of taste? What does taste as a social and aesthetic category have to do with taste as a gustatory sense? This seminar will explore these and other aspects of the multi-facetted phenomenon of taste from a variety of perspectives.

We will explore representations of place and environment across a range of time periods, genres, and perspectives in Hindi and Urdu literature. Our sources will include short stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from novels, travelogues, and diaries. Questions and themes such as human-animal connections; urbanization, industrialization, and ecological degradation; and intersections of culture, timescale, affect and place, will be among some of the prevailing issues addressed. Students will engage in close critical reflection on issues and perspectives.

An introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1600. Readings focus on primary texts in translation and are complemented by museum visits and supplementary materials on the course website. The course aims to allow students to explore the unique aspects of East Asian civilizations and the connections between them through an interactive web-based platform, in which assignments are integrated with the texts and media on the website. No prior knowledge of East Asia or experience working with digital media is required.

This course will explore the ways in which national identity was imagined and implemented within Italian literature, culture, and cinema before, during, and after the period of Italian unification in the mid-XIX century. Examples are drawn from a wide range of literary, artistic and cultural media.

Beginning as early as Don Quixote, experiments with translation have long accompanied Hispanic literary innovation and, often, political subversion. In this course, we will consider Latin American and Latinx texts from across much of 20th and 21st centuries that engage translation as trope, form, or material rearrangements (including translation narratives, fake translations, mistranslations, transcreations, conceptual experiments) and those that rewrite established texts from the margins. We will read these materials alongside translation theory and criticism to tease out the aesthetics and politics of translation in each undertaking.

Some of the best movies ever made focus on the how and why of theatermaking. This course will focus on five classics of Global Cinema that deploy filmic means to explore how theaters around the world have wrestled with artistic, existential, moral, cultural, and professional issues equally central to any serious consideration of moviemaking. These films prompt questions about the nature of each medium, their interrelationship, and our apparent need for both. Along the way, they also offer compelling snapshots of theater and film history.

Translation is at the heart of the humanities, and it arises in every discipline in the social sciences and beyond, but it is not easy to say what it is. This course looks at the role of translation in the past and in the world of today, in fields as varied as anthropology, the media, law, international relations and the circulation and study of literature. It aims to help students grasp the basic intellectual and philosophical problems raised by the transfer of meanings from one language to another (including in machine translation) and to acquaint them with the functions, structures and effects of translation in intercultural communication.

Translation is at the core of our encounters with East Asia. From translations of the literary classics to contemporary novels and poetry, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to national identities to East-West travels of works in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on the classical principles of translation and problematizing what the "translation" of "original works" even means anymore in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.