Fall 2011 Course Offerings
ECS 301/EPS 301 Turning Points in European Culture A. Rabinbach W 1:30-4:20
Seminar draws on expertise of guest faculty from Princeton and elsewhere to provide a broad, multi-disciplinary perspective on turning points in European culture from the late middle ages to the present. This is a gateway course for ECS and Contemporary European Politics and Society. Topics in literature, art, music, philosophy, political theory, and history of science. Guest faculty include: R. Hollander (Dante), D. Garber (Descartes), R. Darnton (Enlightenment), C. Abbate (Wagner), A. Nehamas (Nietzsche), H. Morris (Freud), S. Corngold (Kafka), M. Jennings (Benjamin), and F. Zeitlin (Holocaust and questions of memory in European Culture since 1945). Poster
ECS 317/COM 317Transnational Modernism Benjamin Conisbee Baer Th 1:30 pm-4:20
How did modernist writers around the world imagine and represent other worlds in relation to their own? How were tangled lines of connection and disjuncture, locality, inter- and outer-nationality, movement and stasis, given form in different places and situations? Does this have anything to do with the specificity of what we call "modernism" in literature? Can modernism sabotage a globalizing modernity? We trace lines of (dis)connection--from Harlem to Paris to a wider black diaspora encompassing Africa and the Caribbean; from England to the Americas; below the nation in colonial India; and from the Antilles to Algeria to France. Poster
ECS 312/GER 312 Murder and the Media D. Fore M 1:30-4:20
What is the relationship between the modern media and violent crime? No question that murder is a favorite topic of yellow journalism, but some would also argue that the mass media provoke criminal behavior through the very act of depicting it. By looking at how murder is “composed” in a number of popular media ranging from detective literature to crime scene photography, this seminar investigates the feedback loop between crime and its representation in modern life. While the course covers a variety of texts from the 19th century to the postwar period, the historical focus of the seminar will be the crime-obsessed culture of Weimar Germany. Poster