EPS 302/ECS 302  Poster
Turning Points in European Culture
Professor Harold James
M 1:30-4:20

This course gives broad and inter-disciplinary 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 defined and reshaped. It is conceived as an introduction to many of the courses in Princeton dealing with European issues. The landmarks include, but are not restricted to, written texts. They include Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx and J.S. Mil, but also Fra Angelico, Beethoven and Thomas Mann.

The Modern Period
Professor Susan Draper
Th 1:30-4:20

In this course we will approach different literary and critical texts that problematize and configure the relations between space, architecture, and fiction in modern literature.  We will explore the configuration of real and imaginary cities, architectural constructions, utopias and dystopias, and different philosophies of space.  Writers to be discussed include Bolaño, Borges, Calvino, Cortázar,

Lispector, García Lorca, Orwell.  Theoretical readings by Freud, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze, and

Heidegger.

Cultural Systems : Dream, Delusion and Reality in Literature Around 1850
Professor Saskia Haag
MW 1:30-2:50

In the post-Enlightenment period dreams and uncanny visions appear again in European literature.  19th century novels, poems, plays feature dreams that border on delusion and madness. The line between reality and illusion forfeits its stability.  This seminar inquires into how dreams relate to the political and social changes of the time.  Also focuses on the link between dreamlike states of the mind and literature itself. Particular attention is given to different modes in which dream and delusion are represented in texts by writers of the period, from Hoffmann to Poe and Flaubert.

Central-European Literature of the 20^th Century
Professor Irena G. Gross
MW 1:30-2:50

This course is designed to introduce students to Central European literature, culture and history.  We

will focus on texts from Poland, ex-Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and the impact of Jewish culture on the region as a whole.  The course will begin with the interwar period (1918-1939) and the immediate postwar part of the course is dominated by fictional and non-fictional accounts of World War II, the Holocaust and Communism.  We will discuss literature as an opposition tool, the writer in exile, and the post-communist accounting for the past.

 

Writing About Art (Rilke, Freud, Benjamin)
Professor Brigid Doherty
MW 11:00-12:20

Seminar addresses significance of works of art, and of practices of writing about visual art, in the work of three great writers of German in the early 20th-century: poet Rainer Maria Rilke; founder of

psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; and philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin.  Emphasis on close reading and critical analysis.  Readings drawn from variety of fields and genres, including: lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, cultural analysis, aesthetic theory, criticism.  Topics include: situation of work of art in modernity; art and the unconscious; the work of art and the

historical transmission of culture in modern Europe.

Holocaust Testimony
Professor Thomas A. Trezise
T 1:30-4:20

This course focuses on major issues raised by but also extending beyond Holocaust survivor testimony, including the communication of trauma, genres of witnessing, the ethical implications of artistic representation, conflicts between history and memory, the fate of individuality in collective upheaval, the condition of survival itself, and the crucial role played by reception in enabling and transmitting survivors' speech.