Princeton Writing Program

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Welcome, Class of 2017!  We will be posting descriptions of the Fall 2013 Writing Seminars in mid-July.

Writing Seminars have a common goal—for students, through practice and guidance, to master essential strategies and techniques of academic inquiry and argument. Writing Seminars also have a common structure: unlike most other courses, which are organized around readings, Writing Seminars are organized primarily around writing—specifically, a series of four assignments, totaling about 30 finished pages.

While Writing Seminars all focus on the skills necessary for effective critical reading and writing, they differ in the topics and texts assigned. Below are topic descriptions of the many different Writing Seminars being offered this term.

As described in How to Enroll, you will enroll in a Writing Seminar by ranking your top 8 choices online at any time during the enrollment period. You can sort the list of Writing Seminars below by title and time to help you find the ones that interest you most and best fit your schedule. To read a full description of the course, click on the course title.  To increase your chances of being assigned to one of your top preferences, choose seminars that meet at a range of times, including morning and evening. Be sure to keep in mind your class schedule and extracurricular commitments.

Fall 2012 Enrollment Schedule

• Students Assigned to a Term for the Writing Seminar
  Sent Friday, July 27
• Students May Request a Term Change Online:  First Chance
  Monday, July 30, 9am - Friday, August 10, 5pm
• Students May Request a Term Change Online:  Final Chance
  Friday, September 7, 9am - Wednesday, September 12, 9 am
  
• Students Enroll in a Writing Seminar Online
  Monday, September 10, 5pm - Wednesday, September 12, 5pm
  * This process is not first come, first served.  Enroll anytime during the enrollment period, and your chance of receiving one of your top choices is as good as everyone else's.
• Students Notified by E-mail of Writing Seminar Assignments
  Thursday, September 13, 5pm
• Students May Request a Writing Seminar Change Online
  Thursday, September 13, 5pm - Saturday, September 15, 12 noon
  * No requests to change a Writing Seminar will be accepted after the deadline without the special permission of the Writing Program Director and your Director of Studies.
• First Day of M/W Writing Seminars
  Monday, September 17
• First Day of T/Th Writing Seminars
  Tuesday, September 18

Writing Seminars

Click column heading to sort seminars by name, number, professor, or time.

Writing Seminar Descriptions

The 1912 Election
Keith Shaw
WRI 107: T/TH 1:30pm-2:50pm

A century before Barack Obama launched his campaign for a second presidential term, Princeton’s own Woodrow Wilson won his first in a landslide victory. It was a bizarre election by any standard: the newly formed “Bull Moose” party carried six states as the runner-up, the Republican incumbent won a paltry eight electoral votes, and nearly a million Americans cast their ballot for a socialist. This Writing Seminar puts the 1912 election under a microscope to explore not only the unique conflicts of the Progressive Era but also the continuities of America’s great political debates. For all that appears foreign in the America of Teddy Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and William Jennings Bryan, we nonetheless find many of the pressing issues which will define the 2012 election: corporate regulation, political corruption, tax justice, and overseas military intervention. We begin by analyzing the campaign speeches and policy platforms of the four 1912 presidential aspirants before moving on to ask how the candidates fit into the unusual evolution of America’s political traditions. For the research essay, students investigate a controversy of their choice, tracing its arc beyond the Progressive Era and through the 20th century to advance an argument about U.S. politics today.

Accounting for Taste
Emily Coit
WRI 123: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 124: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm

“There’s no accounting for taste,” the old saying goes, implying that we like our favorite shoes, cars, and paintings for reasons that simply can’t be explained. In this Writing Seminar, we challenge that assumption. Taking late 19th-century literature and culture as a point of departure, we delve into debates from history, sociology, and literary studies in order to better understand the construction of taste, giving special attention to the complex role that “good taste” can play in perpetuating social hierarchies. We begin by examining the treatment of class in Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace.” Then we consider Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton in the context of the intensifying consumer culture of the fin de siècle. During the second half of the semester, students conduct original research on an independently designed topic, investigating the role of taste in a work of art or cultural practice of their own choosing. Possible topics include fashion in Japanese youth subcultures, controversial interpretations of Bach's music, Starbucks coffee as a status symbol, and the changing tastes of Princeton students themselves. In the last part of the course, students write personal essays that attempt to account for their own tastes.

America and the Melting Pot
Karen E. H. Skinazi
WRI 157: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 158: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm

In 1916 automobile tycoon Henry Ford staged a pageant for his Americanization School’s graduation ceremony, complete with immigrant factory workers dressed in Old World costumes descending into a 20-foot-tall cauldron only to re-emerge as flag-waving American entrepreneurs in business suits. The “melting pot” ideology dramatized by Ford is long-standing but has been put to the test with the election of biracial president Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia. While some commentators celebrated the President as a symbol of American multiculturalism, others were quick to silence discussions of difference, declaring America postracial and postethnic. In this Writing Seminar, we examine the ongoing tension between America’s images of itself as a multicultural society and as a melting pot. We begin by using theories on “passing” to evaluate representations of assimilation and race in the 1927 films The Jazz Singer and Old San Francisco. We then look at contemporary ethnic literature against what Marxist theorist Raymond Williams calls “the effective dominant culture” to think about the relationships between America’s center and its margins. Next, students research a marginalized American community, such as ultra-Orthodox Jews, Chicano revolutionaries, or LGBT groups. We conclude by reading the graphic novel American Born Chinese and creating our own short graphic texts depicting a group identity in America.

American Mysticism
George Laufenberg
WRI 191: T/TH 7:30pm-8:50pm

The term “mystical” is often used to accuse someone of being irrational or to express skepticism toward occult or supernatural beliefs. More generally, however, mysticism describes an orientation to the world in which experience is treated as truth, whether or not it is verifiable or reproducible. In a historical moment dominated by scientific authority, exploring the relationship between “experience” and “truth” is key to understanding how mysticism continues to shape our daily practices: 115 million Americans used “alternative” medicine in 2007, for example—and spent $34 billion in the process. In this Writing Seminar, we explore the historical foundations and contemporary dimensions of American mysticism. We begin by examining William James’s and John Dewey’s classic meditations on truth and experience in light of 21st-century investigations into the neuroscience of mysticism. We then analyze the relationship between truth and evidence in a 2010 documentary, American Mystic, which offers a glimpse into the life of a Lakota sundancer, among others. For the research paper, students explore the mystical aspects of a topic of their choosing—for example, the 45% of Chicago-area doctors who prescribe placebos; yoga in popular culture, narratives of near-death experience, or the surge of séances and spiritualism following the Civil War.

American Revolutions
Dov Weinryb Grohsgal
WRI 184: M/W 8:30am-9:50am

What constitutes an American revolution? The word means “to murder and create,” as political scientist Louis Hartz wrote, borrowing from T.S. Eliot, “but the American experience has been projected strangely in the realm of creation alone.” Hartz is one voice among many in the scholarly debate that we engage in this Writing Seminar as we challenge historical conceptions of revolution. We reconsider our own assumptions about the meaning of the word as we ask: How does a movement become a “revolution,” and what is the difference between the two? Who owns the language of revolution, and why does it matter? We begin by analyzing texts by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, as well as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to develop arguments about the American Revolution. Next, students survey scholarly conceptions of “American exceptionalism” to consider revolution in a global framework, assessing the arguments of Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and Arthur Schlesinger. In the second half of the semester, students research events with revolutionary characteristics—for instance, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Reagan revolution, the sexual revolution, or September 11th. Finally, students learn how to turn their research into an op-ed.

The Art of Adventure
Anne Hirsch Moffitt
WRI 151: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm
WRI 152: T/TH 1:30pm-2:50pm

“For an occurrence to become an adventure,” French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.” In other words, adventures are made in their telling. But if this is so, what sets adventure apart from other forms of narrative and artistic expression? And why are we so drawn to adventures in the first place—in stories and in life? Do adventures take us away from our everyday world or provide insight into it? In this Writing Seminar, we investigate the complex cultural meanings of adventure in literature, film, and everyday life. We begin by using the writings of sociologist Georg Simmel to assess the role of adventure in Miguel de Cervantes’s classic tale of chivalry and foolhardiness, Don Quixote. Next, we study theories of empire and conquest to offer new interpretations of the politics of adventure in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For the research paper, students study the cultural meaning of adventure in art or life. Possible topics include summer camp, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, climbing Mount Everest, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. We conclude by creating our own spoofs of well-known adventure stories.

The Arts of Protest
Andrew R. Mossin
WRI 189: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 190: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Allen Ginsberg proclaimed in the opening line of his groundbreaking 1955 poem, “Howl.” For poets, musicians, and other artists of the 1950s and 1960s, Ginsberg’s poem became a rallying cry against core tenets of American ideology. Why do writers, artists, and performers often position themselves in opposition to commonly held understandings of America? What kind of changed nation do these artists envision through their songs, novels, plays, and performances? In this Writing Seminar, we explore how various artists beginning in the mid-20th century reimagined their critical role at a time when the center of American culture resisted confronting dominant beliefs and values. We begin by questioning if and how American concepts of freedom relate to the artistic protest made in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” We then examine how Bob Dylan redefined the cultural moment of the 1960s through his inspired linking of folk and rock music with an activist politics of protest. In the second half of the semester, students research significant contemporary protests in literature, music, or the performing arts. Students end the semester by creating and producing their own art-based protests in a medium of their choosing.

Contagion
Khristina Gonzalez
WRI 109: T/TH 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 110: T/TH 7:30pm-8:50pm

What do vampires, the swine flu, and the latest YouTube phenomenon have in common? They are all viral, easily spreading from body to body, place to place. No wonder so many horror movies (think zombies) involve the threat of contagion—the very concept threatens borders, making us question whether our nations, our bodies, and even our minds are uniquely our own. But is contagion always a bad thing? Consider, for instance, how the spread of national pride unites a country during the Olympics. In this Writing Seminar, we examine how literature, film, and other texts use contagion to show the threat—or promise—of violated borders. We begin by analyzing visual images of bodily disease and injury, considering how these representations spread feelings of sympathy, disgust, or vulnerability to observers. We then read two short stories, Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire tale, Carmilla, and a Sherlock Holmes mystery, to see how contagion can be a metaphor for international contact. To address the current fascination with contagion narratives, students select a work of popular culture to see how it engages with a particular social issue. Possible topics include economic speculation, the movie Contagion, or the recent media frenzy over cannibalistic crimes. Finally, students create their own viral internet meme in any medium.

Contemporary American Prose
Carol Rigolot
WRI 106: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

Factual writing, also known as literary journalism and creative nonfiction, has flourished in recent decades, covering all kinds of subjects, from deeply personal experiences to timely political and cultural issues. In this Writing Seminar, we read an array of prominent contemporary writers and journalists. We analyze the challenges they faced and the narrative choices they made in representing diverse, complex, and often volatile subjects to wide-ranging audiences. Texts range from lighthearted to serious: John McPhee on childhood memories, Joel Achenbach on UFOs, Nancy Gibbs and Jim Dwyer on terrorism, Jeffrey Bartholet on the environment, Ethan Bronner on the Middle East, Roger Cohen on Cuba, Lisa Cohen on the drama of a kidnapped child, Gil Gaul on internet gambling. All of the authors have taught at Princeton as Ferris/McGraw/Robbins Professors of Writing and have contributed favorite pieces to the The Princeton Anthology of Writing, our central text. These varied and compelling articles serve as models for our own writing, including a research project for which students choose their own topics, and a memorandum in which they write persuasively to effect a change on campus. Prominent journalists visit the class as guest speakers.

Culture and Inequality
Rebekah Peeples Massengill
WRI 154: M/W 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 155: M/W 11:00am-12:20pm

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, numerous onlookers proposed that one positive outcome of this tragedy might be that the city’s impoverished neighborhoods could be rebuilt in ways that changed the “culture of poverty” that allegedly condemns many Americans to generations of hardship. Yet other scholars question if a “culture of poverty” even exists and debate the extent to which culture is a useful concept for understanding the causes of inequality. This course invites students to enter into this conversation and think critically about the role that culture plays in creating and maintaining economic divisions among Americans. Accordingly, we begin this Writing Seminar by critically examining the controversial “culture of poverty” thesis as originally developed by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. We then move to consider how a cultural approach can help illuminate new dimensions of inequality in other settings, such as families, schools, and the consumer marketplace. In the second half of the semester, students will pick a problem or issue related to inequality in the United States and develop a researched argument that explores some dimensions of this problem in a new or unexpected way. Students conclude the course by writing an opinion piece about inequality in America.

Darwin and His Legacy
Anne DeWitt
WRI 126: M/W 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 127: M/W 11:00am-12:20pm

A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center found that one-third of Americans reject the theory of evolution, predominantly because evolution contradicts the story of creation in Genesis. In contrast, direct conflict between evolution and the Bible was not an important issue for readers when Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, because many Victorians interpreted Genesis metaphorically rather than literally. Nonetheless, Darwin’s contemporaries saw plenty of problems with the scientific arguments and religious implications of his theory. This course investigates the cultural history of the often unexpected responses to Darwin and evolution. What makes evolution such a contentious topic? How have the grounds for controversy changed over time, and how have the controversies themselves been remembered and mythologized? We begin with the Origin, examining how Darwin sought to appeal to his Victorian audience, and how that audience responded. We then investigate the facts and legends of the 1925 trial of schoolteacher John Scopes, charged with violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution. For the research paper, students explore the intellectual history of Darwin’s ideas or their legacy for science, religion, or popular culture. We conclude by writing about Darwin’s ideas and their impact for a general audience.

The Ethics of Persuasion
Kristin Dombek
WRI 173: M/W 1:30pm-2:50pm

“Writers are always selling somebody out,” confessed Joan Didion in the preface to her revolutionary book of journalism Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Centuries before, Aristotle argued that the most important element of persuasion is the writer’s “ethos”: our sense of his or her fairmindedness and character. If writing nonfiction means selling others out, is ethos always a fake? Or can writing be an ethical act—honest, generous, even redemptive? In this Writing Seminar, we reckon with the problem of ethos and the ethics of representing the self and others in journalistic and academic essays. We study great American nonfiction writers from a range of genres, including Didion, Annie Dillard, Janet Malcolm, Tim O’Brien, Richard Rodriguez, Gay Talese, and David Foster Wallace. We begin by examining essays that make political or cultural arguments and then turn to essays that depict the experience of others, testing Didion’s critique of writing. In research projects, we craft ethos in academic writing, borrowing from the techniques of literary journalism and drawing on scholarly research from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences to make arguments about current political or cultural events or controversies. Our final essay is a brief creative essay from personal experience.

Fans and Consumer Culture
Marion C. Wrenn
WRI 149: T/TH 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 150: T/TH 7:30pm-8:50pm

After the sci-fi television series Firefly was canceled in 2003, enthusiastic fans—dubbed “Browncoats,” after resistance fighters in the show—generated enough buzz to convince Universal Pictures to produce a spin-off film, Serenity. The Browncoats’ success in eliciting a product they wanted to consume illustrates how deeply embedded fandom is in consumer culture today. Trekkies, soccer hooligans, opera buffs, Harry “Potterheads,” Janeites (devotees of Jane Austen), and gamers—these and other fan groups are proliferating and exerting power as never before. In this Writing Seminar, we draw on sociology and media studies to ask how the cultural practices of fans illuminate the broader logics of democracy, capitalism, and globalization. We begin by using the critical theories of social philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to speculate on how fans become both dupes of consumer culture and active participants in it. We then analyze the popularity of professional wrestling, borrowing ideas from cultural theorists Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu to aid our investigation. For the research essay, students use ideas about audience, spectacle, and the culture industry to interpret a site or expression of fandom. Finally, students collaborate on a symposium about the relation of fans to contemporary consumer culture.

Food Matters
J. Michelle Coghlan
WRI 192: M/W 1:30pm-2:50pm
WRI 193: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

“Food,” as Molly Wizenberg reminds us, “is never just food. It’s also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.” But what exactly is at stake when we step into the kitchen, choose a restaurant, watch a cooking show, or read about a meal someone else ate? This Writing Seminar explores food as a marker of complex and oft-conflicting desires, affiliations, and identities in American culture—national belonging and regional attachments, class distinctions and gender stereotypes, agricultural policies and imperial legacies, public agendas and personal tastes. We begin by examining Roland Barthes’s famous meditation on the symbolic work of food in light of Leslie Li’s powerful memoir of cross-cultural cuisine, Daughter of Heaven. We then turn to two recent food-centric films, Julie & Julia and The Help, to complicate our reading of both postwar and contemporary food cultures. In the second part of the term, students choose a food matter in fiction or film and research the ways it refashions our culinary fantasies, anxieties, or futures. Finally, students cook up their own multimedia food projects in the form of a blog-cookbook, short film, cooking show, or restaurant review.

Genius
Amelia Worsley
WRI 125: T/TH 7:30pm-8:50pm

Galileo, da Vinci, Shakespeare; Mozart, Austen, Darwin; Einstein, Picasso, Gandhi: each of these people has been said to possess something that we today call “genius.” This Writing Seminar considers how the invention of the term—as recently as the 18th century—has influenced understandings of creativity in spheres as diverse as art, science, politics, economics, and sports. Why are geniuses so often depicted as antisocial—as misfits, solitaries, or madmen? What cultural uses has “genius” been put to and how have race, class, and gender stereotypes shaped them? First, we analyze recent depictions of Steve Jobs in relation to important theorists of genius like Kant and Agamben. Then we consider how a historical understanding of genius complicates seemingly simple representations of it, using the movies Proof and A Beautiful Mind as case studies. For the research essay, students choose a representation of genius—whether of a real-life figure like Rousseau, Marie Curie, or David Foster Wallace, a fictional character like Dexter or Don Draper, or a tradition like the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants”—and make an argument about the concept’s social function. We end by exploring what “genius” means in 21st-century Princeton, once home to Albert Einstein, John Nash—and now you.

Image and Imagination
Walter Johnston
WRI 194: M/W 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 195: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

Seeing, the proverb goes, is believing, and this insight seems particularly important in our information age, when revolutions are triggered by cell phone images, social media reconfigure how we see and are seen by others, and advertising images are customized to consumers based on automated scans of private information like email. But why do we invest the image with this power to persuade? How do images convey meaning and how do different ways of seeing shape the world in which we live? In this Writing Seminar, students take a historical approach to these questions, analyzing the nature of visibility in works of art, film, photography, and literature from antiquity to the present. We begin by analyzing the act of looking in Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas and the tension between appearances and reality in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. Next, we use philosophical theories of spectatorship to interpret Kiarostami’s film about Iranian theater, Shirin. For the research paper, students examine the power of “seeing” in any cultural work or phenomenon in contemporary media technology. Possible topics include philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination, the use of imaging technology in the conduct of warfare, and the popularity of Instagram. Finally, students curate virtual exhibits of images or texts reflecting on the seminar’s main themes.

Into the Wild
Christopher M. Kurpiewski
WRI 178: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am

From mountains of salt to lakes of whiskey, sensational rumors lured 19th-century settlers into the untamed vastness of North America. To relaunch her popular book club this year, Oprah Winfrey picked Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about her transformation during an 1,100-mile hike through the wilderness. What does our enduring fascination with the wild tell us about human society? How has our relationship to the wild changed as technology has advanced and the global population has risen? We begin by examining Robin Hood and Sir Yvain, adventurers of the medieval forest, in relation to the idea of “rewilding”—or overcoming human domestication—advocated by today’s primitivist movements in Britain. We turn next to maps, illustrations, and eyewitness accounts of the New World as we assess how Europeans imagined the influence of the American wilderness on its native inhabitants. For the research project, students investigate a modern depiction of the wilderness and what it tells us about the relationship between civilization and nature. Possible topics range from wildlife documentaries to Survivor, from the emerging science on personal ecosystems to debates over drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Finally, students use Google Earth and other media to create virtual guidebooks through a wilderness they choose.

Knowledge and Travel
Richard Joseph Martin
WRI 166: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

We often think of traveling as a way to acquire knowledge about others: we anticipate that voyagers’ tales will emphasize encounters with distant lands and different peoples. But through these journeys, travelers also make insightful discoveries about themselves. In this Writing Seminar, we explore the kinds of knowledge that journeys and travels produce. We ask: What do we learn when we go abroad, and how might we learn such things without ever leaving our own backyards? First, we examine the uses of travel in anthropological writings––from Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa to Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life––as we consider the relationship between leaving home and having a tale worth telling. Next, we engage contemporary debates about knowledge and power, analyzing James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar through the critical lens of Edward Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism. Here, we develop our ideas using sources from across the social sciences. In the semester’s second half, we make researched arguments about the significance of travel, focusing on a work of art or literature, or a cultural practice. Finally, we draw on personal experiences and encounters in places far––or near––to produce travel writings of our own.

Language, Identity, and Power
Timothy Haupt
WRI 198: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 199: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm

According to Strunk and White’s classic book on writing, “style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style.” Yet as sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have shown, identity involves a complex negotiation between social groups and thus remains in constant flux. In this Writing Seminar, we consider language as a key resource in the construction and performance of identities. How is language used to distinguish, authenticate, and legitimate certain speakers over and against others? Why is the definition of proper style such a politically contentious issue? We use hip hop as a springboard into our topic and begin by analyzing how Nas and N.W.A. use language to construct identities grounded explicitly in terms of race, class, and gender. We then turn to Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the relation between language and power in order to assess how generational, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions play out linguistically. For the research paper, students choose a sociocultural group or movement—in class we will consider “nerds” as an example—and analyze how conflicts surrounding identity are linked to struggles for authority. Finally, we reflect on our own experiences of language and belonging.

The Language of Love
Yaron Aronowicz
WRI 188: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

It’s said that Van Gogh cut off his ear for love and Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal for it. From crimes of passion to selfless sacrifices, from clichéd pop songs to the foundational texts of Western civilization––little has inspired as many expressions as love. But what do we really mean when we invoke the word “love”? And why is romantic love often understood as what we must share and yet can never communicate; what is most true about us, but over which we have no control; the ground for ethics and the occasion for brutality? This Writing Seminar examines love’s many languages––considering love as a feeling, structure of relation, political mode, and form of writing. We begin by reading Plato’s famous dialogue on love, The Symposium, alongside 20th-century sociological, psychoanalytic, and linguistic grapples with it. We then consider the curious intertwining of desire and ambivalence in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic crime thriller Breathless, together with modern meditations on love’s potential for nurture and harm. In the second half of the term, students select a text or object and research the ways it reshapes our understanding of love. We end by creating a multimedia representation of our ideas about the work of love.

Main Street, USA
Leanne Wood
WRI 131: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

Economist Robert Reich described 2009 as “the year that Wall Street bounced back and Main Street got shafted.” But what does “Main Street” mean, exactly? Even as it is used as shorthand for an idealized image of America and the concerns of ordinary Americans, Main Street has also sometimes been portrayed as the imagined home of our worst tendencies—pettiness, prejudice, and provincialism. In this Writing Seminar, we consider the significance of these contradictory visions of Main Street by tracing the ways that they grow out of American literature, popular entertainment, and politics. We begin with a study in nostalgia as we analyze the stylized and trouble-free townscape that Walt Disney designed for Disneyland in 1955. We then consider how critical representations of small towns in Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street and the 1940s films It’s a Wonderful Life and Shadow of a Doubt complicate the Main Street ideal. During the latter half of the course, students develop their own topics for research as we debate the ways that our national and individual identities depend upon our ideas about Main Street. Finally, students create a guided tour—a podcast, guidebook, or photo-essay—for a street that they know well.

Modern Memory
Amanda Irwin Wilkins
WRI 120: T/TH 1:30pm-2:50pm

“Memory is what makes our lives,” filmmaker Luis Buñuel observed. “Without it, we are nothing.” Yet as modern novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shown, memory is as fragmentary and fallible as it is essential to human existence. In this Writing Seminar, we consider the nature and meaning of memory in the modern world. How does personal memory differ from collective remembering? What constitutes an ethical relationship with the dead and with the past? And what is the role of forgetting in remembering? We begin with the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home (2006), in which cartoonist Alison Bechdel tries to piece together her father’s ambiguous history and understand her place within it. Using the insights of Cathy Caruth and Susan Sontag, we then analyze the workings of memory in the influential film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in which images of catastrophe are juxtaposed with the love affair of two survivors a decade later. For the research paper, we turn to the relationship between private and public remembering: students select a memorial site, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and explore its implicit statements about what and how we remember. We conclude by reflecting on our own memories and ways of remembering.

Morality and Politics
Ali Aslam
WRI 112: M/W 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 113: M/W 11:00am-12:20pm

Why do we enter political life? Is it to do the “right” thing? Is there a place for those who wish to do the right thing in politics or is that position naïve? How, moreover, do we define what’s right? An initial glance at popular rhetoric from ancient Athens to contemporary America suggests that democratic citizens are especially motivated by principled commitments to justice, fairness, and equality. A second look, however, indicates a more troubled relationship between politics and principled action. In this Writing Seminar we consider the place of morality in politics, examining the contradictions that have plagued the intersection of morality and politics from ancient Athens to the present. Beginning with Thucydides’ History, we trace the ambivalences that have shadowed claims of just actions in politics. Next, we read Machiavelli’s The Prince and influential political theorists to contribute to the scholarly conversation about the relationship between morality and power. For the research essay, students investigate how recent developments in political, military, economic, and cultural life have changed our understanding of the boundaries between morality and politics. Possible topics include the War on Terror and rise of multinational corporations and intergovernmental organizations like the European Union. We conclude by writing op-ed articles that intervene in public debates about morality and politics.

Music and Power
Andrea Mazzariello
WRI 135: M/W 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 136: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

The explosion in popularity of mp3 downloads allegedly portends the end of the music industry’s power as we’ve come to know it, while musicians use their compositions to express scathing critique, subtle reinforcement, or outright support of society’s existing power dynamics. How do artists position themselves in relation to the business of music and to the dominant culture as a whole? How does the sound of cultural engagement manifest in music itself? This course explores music’s ability to advocate or question prevailing values and mores. First, we use Radiohead’s In Rainbows as well as its novel distribution scheme to test Walter Benjamin’s provocative assertions on the mechanical reproduction of art. Next, we examine Amiri Baraka’s “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music)” and music criticism by Daphne Brooks in order to evaluate Erykah Badu’s incendiary New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War). Students then choose a long-form musical work and make a researched argument about its relationship to power. Possible topics include The Mingus Big Band’s Blues and Politics, Bikini Kill’s Revolution Girl Style Now!, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. We conclude by creating press kits for imaginary bands relevant to a particular cultural and historical moment.

A Nation of Immigrants
Maria Medvedeva
WRI 159: M/W 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 160: M/W 11:00am-12:20pm

In 1958, John F. Kennedy described the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” in both its past and its imagined future. With immigrants and their children accounting for one in five Americans today, how do we distinguish between an American, an immigrant, and a foreigner? Why do these distinctions fundamentally shape individual experiences, mobilize communities, and drive policies and politics? This Writing Seminar examines the connection among immigration, policy, and identity in our global world. First, we analyze the recent documentary Farmingville about a community response to undocumented day laborers in small town America to assess President Kennedy’s argument about American national identity in A Nation of Immigrants. Next, students examine current immigration-related events and develop arguments that participate in scholarly conversations about race, class, membership, and belonging in the migration cultures of North America, the European Union, and Asia. For the research essay, students investigate any issue related to immigration and examine its social, political, or economic implications. Possible topics include immigrant childhoods, bilingual education, immigrant religions, labor-market competition, return migration, and border security. We conclude by creating blogs or op-ed articles inviting the public to reconsider contested issues in immigration.

The Neuroscience of Being Human
Joseph Califf
WRI 142: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 143: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm

The human brain is often said to be the most complex system in the universe, yet on its own, it amounts to approximately three pounds of flesh. Recent research in neuroscience is transforming the way we understand human behavior and raising philosophical questions that affect us all. If the brain is part of the body, how do we define its relationship to the mind? And if our behaviors, emotional states, and personalities are shaped by our neurochemistry, is our brain who we really are? In this Writing Seminar, we investigate how neuroscience is challenging traditional understandings of what it means to be human. We begin by assessing Descartes’s philosophical theory on the body-mind relationship through the lens of new scientific experiments on the brain. We then consider the complex interactions between the brain and behavior that contribute to emotions––from love and attachment to fear and aggression––in humans and other animals through the writings of Darwin, Freud, Robert Sapolsky, and others. For the research project, students explore any controversial area in neuroscience. Possible topics include the science of addiction, new applications of neuroscience in law, and the neurochemistry of love. Finally, students write opinion pieces that present their research findings to a nonscience audience.

Rebellion and Recognition
Joshua Vandiver
WRI 145: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

“Rage.” That first word of Homer’s Iliad expresses the righteous anger Achilles feels when his heroism goes unrecognized. The human desire for due recognition in the eyes of others can shape the actions of an individual, but it can also, of course, motivate rebellion on a broader scale, for groups seeking national autonomy, a political voice, or religious freedom. But what qualities make a person or group worthy of recognition, and who gets to be the judge? If recognition is denied, in what circumstances is violence a justifiable response? We’ll explore questions like these in the light of ancient Greek thought. First, we analyze Homer’s depiction of recognition and rebellion during the Trojan War. Turning to Plato and Aristotle, we test arguments about the detached rule of reason as an alternative to righteous anger and other passions. In the second half of the semester, students select a historical or contemporary event of their choice and develop an argument about how it complicates our understanding of the concepts of rebellion and recognition. Possible topics range from women’s suffrage to the Civil Rights Movement, from the American Revolution to the Arab Spring. Finally, we examine the role of social media in shaping political change.

Representing Illness
Patrick W. Moran
WRI 117: M/W 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 118: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

The 20th-century novelist Virginia Woolf once described the topic of illness as an “unexploited mine,” arguing that writers had neglected this theme in literature for too long. Such a claim would be difficult to make in our present culture, where illnesses of all kind are represented in Oscar-winning films, novels, blogs, memoirs, and reality-television programs. What drives this fascination? When do works of art productively challenge our ideas about sickness, and when do they reinforce stigma? In this Writing Seminar, we will explore the ethical and cultural implications of imagining illness in literature and the popular media. We begin by reading Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Illness as Metaphor” alongside Margaret Edson’s Wit to examine how the language of sickness shapes writers and readers alike. Next, we consider how identities emerge in relation to disease by turning to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play about the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s. For the research essay, students select a current illness, disability, or medical condition and examine how it figures in the wider culture’s imagination. In the end, students draw upon this research to pitch to their peers and the wider community a responsible awareness campaign about a medical condition.

Saints and Martyrs
Mary Harvey Doyno
WRI 181: M/W 1:30pm-2:50pm
WRI 182: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

We may envision the saint as a haloed otherworldly figure, and picture the medieval martyr dying at the stake. Yet the concepts of saintliness and martyrdom continue to resonate in our own era. Princess Diana, Kurt Cobain, and Che Guevara have been culturally canonized, and suicide bombers believe their deaths to be righting wrongs of the modern world. This Writing Seminar explores the historical and ideological underpinnings of sanctity and martyrdom as well as their persistence into the 21st century. We begin by looking at two foundational texts: the diary of a young Roman woman who died at a gladiator’s sword, and the biography of a medieval hermit who turned to the manipulation of his body to prove his beliefs. We then investigate the development of the cult of Saint Francis through word and image. For the research essay, students select a figure perceived as a saint or martyr—whether secular, such as Eva Perón, or religious, such as Joan of Arc—in any period, making an argument about the figure’s historical and/or cultural significance. We conclude by looking at images of saints in the Princeton Art Museum to inspire our creation of modern-day visual biographies.
 

The Socialist Experiment and Its Legacies
Megan Foreman
WRI 147: T/TH 1:30pm-2:50pm
WRI 148: T/TH 7:30pm-8:50pm

The collapse of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 was one among many symbols that heralded sweeping political and economic changes across Central and Eastern Europe. It marked the end of a socialist experiment of state-planned economies and party-state systems that had dominated these countries for more than 50 years. While experts at the time heralded this as a cultural revolution, they failed to anticipate how profoundly the socialist experiment had shaped how the world could be imagined and experienced across the “post-socialist” block. In this Writing Seminar, we explore the impact and legacies of this socialist experiment. We begin by using anthropological accounts of countries under socialist systems to refine Marx and Engels’s economic theories. Next, we analyze Goodbye Lenin!, a spoof about the transition from socialism to democracy in Eastern Germany, using readings about memory and space as well as the relationship between identity and the state to inform our interpretations. For the research project, students consider an object produced in, or about, socialism or post-socialism. Possible topics include The Lives of Others, Solidarity, or the Beijing Olympics. We end the semester by writing editorials that explore the legacy of socialism in a present-day geopolitical conflict or event.

Society and the Witch
Richard Joseph Martin
WRI 164: M/W 1:30pm-2:50pm

Riding broomsticks and dancing in the woods at night, witches are often imagined to be outside society. But in these representations may be keys to understanding social norms, norms that get articulated through the witch’s very violation of them. In this Writing Seminar, we ask: What do discourses about witches tell us about the societies that produce them? We begin by examining competing anthropological approaches to witchcraft. Here, we enter into critical debates about the purpose and meaning of magic by considering historical and ethnographic accounts of witches as test cases. Next, we use Mary Douglas’s classic treatise on Purity and Danger as a lens through which to analyze popular representations of witches, such as Harry Potter or Bewitched. How, for instance, do these works help us understand political struggles over ideas about class or gender? In the second half of the semester, students choose artistic, ethnographic, or historical examples of witches; using research, they situate their chosen phenomenon in an intellectual context and examine its social significance. Possible topics include Wicked, the Salem witch trials, and neo-paganism. For the Dean’s Date assignment, students create fictional stories about witches as a way to address an issue of contemporary concern.

Technology and Culture
Sajan Saini
WRI 121: M/W 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 122: M/W 7:30pm-8:50pm

When President Lincoln was assassinated, it took eleven days to inform the Parliament of London. Today we transfer multimedia documents around the globe in milliseconds. While technological advancements have always presented humanity with opportunities and challenges, the acceleration of materials innovation in the 20th century has led to radical change in our labor force, economy, and education. In this Writing Seminar, we explore the ethical and cultural implications of recent developments in applied science and engineering. How are communities affected by rapid technological growth? How might societies create incentives for potentially beneficial technologies and safeguards against technologies with the capacity to harm? We begin by exploring how the 1979 film The China Syndrome responds to cultural debates about technology in a Nuclear Age. We then analyze films and theories like Moore’s law to assess how the exponential growth of electronics has transformed society with mixed results. In the semester’s second half, students research a contemporary technology of their choice and investigate its social influence. Possible topics include Wikipedia, smart phones, nuclear energy, or space travel. We conclude by writing op-eds for a popular audience about the technologies we studied, evaluating their potential benefits or risks.

Tragedy
Ken Nielsen
WRI 186: T/TH 3:00pm-4:20pm
WRI 187: T/TH 7:30pm-8:50pm

A man pokes his eyes out upon realizing he has killed his father and slept with his mother. A king returning from war finds his adulterous wife in a murdering mood, and before long he is dead. A wife betrayed by her philandering husband slaughters her two children as revenge. Tragedies portray human actions and emotions at their most extreme. What have these performances of suffering offered audiences for millennia? What social function does tragedy have? What cultural anxieties are revealed or exorcised by these spectacular representations of acute passion, rage, and pain? We begin by examining Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in its cultural and philosophical context by engaging Aristotle’s and Hegel’s philosophies of tragedy. We next explore what modern tragedy looks like through an analysis of Atom Egoyan’s award-winning film The Sweet Hereafter, a meditation on loss and community in the face of tragedy. For the research paper, students select a contemporary cultural artifact and make an argument about how it represents tragedy. Possible topics range from online communities of mourning or the debate over how to commemorate the Oklahoma City bombing to the continuing influence of classical tragedy on contemporary culture in The Wire or Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Transformations of the Self
Neil J. Young
WRI 115: T/TH 8:30am-9:50am
WRI 116: T/TH 11:00am-12:20pm

From animal abuser to animal advocate: Is star athlete Michael Vick’s transformation an authentic narrative of redemption or a cynical commercial performance? When Hollywood celebrities go into rehab, how does the public reinvention of their image encourage or interfere with the private possibility of change? And what does the thriving self-help industry tell us about everyday efforts to remake ourselves in our own eyes as well as the eyes of others? In this Writing Seminar, we examine how individuals construct stories of transformation—and how society consumes them. We first consider religious conversions, reading the classic Biblical tale of Saul’s conversion, as well as later narratives like those of Joseph Smith and Malcolm X. We then place the movie Eat Pray Love in cultural and theoretical context, analyzing how this chronicle of one woman’s search for spirituality and self-knowledge resonates with the literature of self-help and Carl Jung’s theory of individuation. For the research paper, students investigate an account of political, social, or “lifestyle” transformation, such as Whittaker Chambers leaving Communism, immigrants becoming American, transsexuals changing sexes, or meat eaters turning to veganism. In the final essay, students reflect on a self-transformation of their own.

Witnessing Disaster
Tim Recuber
WRI 128: T/TH 1:30pm-2:50pm
WRI 129: T/TH 3:00pm-4:20pm

As the Pentagon burned and the Twin Towers crashed to the ground on September 11th, millions of spectators across the country and the world watched on live television. While distant viewers of this tragedy were shocked and horrified, many people were nonetheless drawn to the continuous coverage. Why do audiences tend to experience both fascination and despair when viewing disasters from afar? How does such ambivalence complicate our understanding of the viewer’s ethical responsibility to others? And how should audiences cope with the moral and emotional problems associated with watching real-life tragedies unfold? These questions may seem unique to our hyper-mediated age, but scholars have debated them for centuries. In this Writing Seminar, we examine the history of this ongoing debate. We begin by reassessing the sole surviving account of the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius that buried the ancient city of Pompeii, in light of recent theories of witnessing. Next, we contribute to debates about disasters by critiquing media coverage of Hurricane Katrina. For the research essay, students choose a disaster or tragedy and make an argument about how it is mediated and consumed by distant audiences. We end the semester by creating memorial websites devoted to our research topics.