"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.

The foreigner, the pervert, the outcast: the imaginary of literary decadence is fixated on figures at the margins of the social order, who are valorized and exalted. This course investigates the aesthetics of abjection in late 19th., early 20th c. (English, French, German) literary and visual culture as it develops in response to European empire. Core themes include: "late" or "decadent" antiquities; decadence and orientalism; Jewish decadence; and how these interact with the catalog of haunting female figures that populate these imaginaries. Class trips include visits to both the Neue Galerie in NYC and Firestone's Special Collections.

In-depth discussion and analysis of conceptions of the sensory in writings by philosophers, poets, art critics and theorists, and artists, from the early modern to contemporary periods. We will investigate the ways in which the sensory is understood as the necessary basis for conceptual thinking of diverse kinds, including systematic and dialectical philosophy (Kant and Hegel), sign theory (Saussure), imaginative and figural writing, and theory and practice of the plastic arts (Rilke, Mallarmé, Adorno, Greenberg, Serra, Stella, Scully, Buchloh, Warhol, among others).

Why are borders so central to our political, moral and affective life? Examining legal theory, novels and films of 20th- century migrations alongside poetry and forensic reports of recent border-crossings, this course traces how mobile subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial militants - have driven the formation of new ethics, political geographies and radical futures. We will situate borders in relation to practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the factory and, finally, we will ask: why did we stop relating to migrants as political subjects and begin treating them as the moral beneficiaries of humanitarianism?

This 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.

This 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.

This course aims at giving a broad and interdisciplinary perspective on some of the very diverse cultural and historical roots of European identity. It examines contemporary debates over contested identity in the light of long historical trajectories in which identities were continually (re)defined. It is conceived as an introduction to many of the courses in Princeton dealing with European issues. The landmarks are mostly, but not exclusively, written texts. They include writers like Virgil, Cervantes and Zola, but also artists such as Beethoven or Claude Monet.

The City of Light beckons. Beyond the myth, however, this course proposes to look at the real sides and "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, 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.

This 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.

Each 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?

The 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.

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.

"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.

This 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.

This course will focus on philosophy and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will read a mixture of philosophical and scientific tests, as well as some contemporary tests in the philosophy of science. We will discuss both the relations between science and philosophy, as well as the way these historical episodes are reflected in more recent philosophical literature.