This course will at different times deal with particular currents of literature and thought in the 18th century, or with individual authors. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Topics in 18th-Century Literature
Professor/Instructor
Claudia L. JohnsonTopics in American Literature
Professor/Instructor
Esther Helen Schor, Deborah Epstein Nord, Maria A. DiBattistaAn investigation of issues outside the scope of traditional surveys of American literature. Topics may include: definitions of "America," literature of the South, contemporary poetry, New Historicism, America on film, the Harlem Renaissance, the Vietnam War, the sentimental novel, colonial encounters, literature of the Americas, fictions of empire, Jewish American writers. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Indigenous Literature and Culture
Professor/Instructor
Robbie RichardsonThis course will look to understand the current and historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in both Western culture and in American culture more specifically, the material effects of such representations and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people, and work toward developing ways of supporting Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It will include a cross-disciplinary program of learning that will work closely with the Indigenous holdings in both Firestone Library and the Princeton Art Museum.
Topics in Romanticism
Professor/Instructor
Esther Helen SchorAn intensive study of particular aspects of British Romanticism, which may include individual authors, genres, experiments, and legacies. Two 90-minute seminars.
19th-Century Fiction
Professor/Instructor
Jeff NunokawaNovels of the Romantic and Victorian periods, beginning with Jane Austen, including the Brontës and the major Victorians, and ending with Hardy. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
19th-Century Poetry
Professor/Instructor
Meredith Anne MartinThis survey of 19th-century British poetry will explore the ways in which Victorian poetry and poetic form influenced and were influenced by national movements: education, empire, voting reform, gender relations, and the rise of technology. It will consider how the afterlife of 19th-century poetry haunts our interpretation of early 20th-century poetry, and re-historicize Victorian poetics amid the vibrant and complicated tapestry of the 19th century. Students will read poems by Tennyson, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Barrett Browning, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Clough, Bridges, and Hopkins. Two 90-minute seminars.
Victorian Literature and Society
Professor/Instructor
An examination of the responses of Victorian novelists, poets, social critics, and graphic artists to poverty, industrialization, the "woman question," prostitution, slum life, and other social and political issues of the day. Special emphasis on the development of a language and imagery of social criticism. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Late Victorian Literature: Decadence and Rebellion
Professor/Instructor
Deborah Epstein NordThis course studies the literature of the last decades of the Victorian era, often referred to as the fin de siècle (or end of the century). It will focus on literary, cultural, and social developments in the final years of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth, among them aestheticism, decadence, literary naturalism, imperialism, socialism, the arts and crafts movement, and the "new woman." Authors to be considered include Wilde, Conrad, Pater, Schreiner, Shaw, Hopkins, Hardy, Bridges, Kipling, Morris, Gissing, and Stevenson. Two ninety-minute lectures, one-hour preceptorial.
Literature and Photography
Professor/Instructor
Eduardo Lujan CadavaSince 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.
American Literature: 1865-1930
Professor/Instructor
Lee Clark MitchellA study of the development of American literature within the context of the shifting social, intellectual, and literary conventions of the period. Emphasis will be on the artistic achievement of writers such as James, Howells, Twain, Dreiser, Crane, Adams, Wharton, Cather, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
African American Literature: Origins to 1910
Professor/Instructor
Autumn M. WomackThis introductory course traces the emergence of an African American literary tradition, from the late-18th century to the early 20th. In readings, assignments, and discussion we will consider the unique cultural contexts, aesthetic debates, and socio-political forces underpinning African American literary cultural and practice. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Paul L. Dunbar, the political oratory of Sojourner Truth and David Walker, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson, writing by W.E.B. DuBois, and novels by Frances Harper. AAS Subfield: AACL
Topics in American Literature
Professor/Instructor
Lee Clark MitchellAn investigation of issues outside the scope of traditional surveys of American literature. Topics may include: definitions of "America," literature of the South, contemporary poetry, New Historicism, America on film, the Harlem Renaissance, the Vietnam War, the sentimental novel, colonial encounters, literature of the Americas, fictions of empire. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Caribbean Literature and Culture
Professor/Instructor
The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas - islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, we will explore questions of indigeneity, colonial contact, iterations of enslavement, and the plantation matrix in literary texts. How do island-writers evoke gender and a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction?
Modern Fiction
Professor/Instructor
Maria A. DiBattistaThe Modern movement in English fiction, from Conrad and Joyce to the present. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Modern Drama I
Professor/Instructor
Michael William CaddenA study of major plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Jarry, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett. Emphasis will be given to the theatrical revolutions they initiated and to the influence they continue to exert on contemporary drama and theater. Two 90-minute seminars.
African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present
Professor/Instructor
Kinohi NishikawaA survey of 20th- and 21st century African American literature, including the tradition's key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature is periodized and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts. AAS Subfield: AACL
American Literature: 1930-Present
Professor/Instructor
Lee Clark MitchellA study of modern American writings, from Faulkner to Diaz, that emphasize the interplay between formal experimentation and thematic diversity. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Contemporary Fiction
Professor/Instructor
Sarah A. ChihayaAn exploration of the connections and disconnects of our ever-smaller world, viewed through English-language novels and films of the last 25 years. At stake: translatability of language and ideas, processes of immigration, dynamics of economic development, history and memory, heroism and maturity, and notions of the future itself, in societies of rapid change. Throughout, the intersections between state policy and individual lives will be considered, such that while the course is premised on grand geopolitical questions, attention will focus on localized examples: specific texts, close reading. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Contemporary Poetry
Professor/Instructor
Susan A. StewartWith an emphasis on British, Australian, and American poetry from 1945 to the present, this course covers a range of work. It considers such groups as the Beats, the Confessionals, the Surrealists, and the New York School, but attention will mostly be devoted to major works by MacDiarmid, Bishop, Lowell, Auden, Berryman, Brooks, Jarrell, Thomas, Larkin, Levertov, Ammons, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Ashbery, Merwin, Tomlinson, Walcott, Hill, Plath, Murray, Trantner, Kinsella, and others. Classwork will be supplemented by attending readings on and off campus. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Contemporary Drama
Professor/Instructor
Tamsen Olivia WolffAn examination of some of the best literature written for the stage since the Second World War. Two lectures, one preceptorial.
Acting, Being, Doing, and Making: Introduction to Performance Studies
Professor/Instructor
Rhaisa Williams, Stacy E. WolfA hands-on approach to this interdisciplinary field. We will apply key readings in performance theory to space and time-based events, at sites ranging from theatre, experimental art, and film, to community celebrations, sport events, and restaurant dining. We will observe people's behavior in everyday life as performance and discuss the "self" through the performativity of one's gender, race, class, ability, and more. We will also practice ethnographic methods to collect stories to adapt for performance and address the role of the participant-observer, thinking about ethics and the social responsibilities of this work.
Topics in Women's Writing
Professor/Instructor
Autumn M. Womack, Lindsay Taelor BrownIn this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women's creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through hands-on engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.
Topics in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Professor/Instructor
Russ Leo, Madison Rae WolfertThis course explores early modern figurations of gender and sex in the literature and philosophy of Europe. We will look carefully at poetry, plays, utopian fiction, and natural philosophy from early modern England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the wider Atlantic world. Orienting our reading around the intersecting paradigms of faith, labor, and utopia, this course will offer us the chance to explore historical theories of gender, sex, and desire as well as consent, race, and property. We will also consider how early modern problems and assumptions inform more recent debates concerning gender and sexuality.
Topics in Critical Theory
Professor/Instructor
Andrew ColeThink Space asks whether our tendency to think space via language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, and the condition of "being in time" is useful or exhaustive. This class is an experiment in what it means to "be" in space, inhabit a place.
The Bible as Literature
Professor/Instructor
D. Vance SmithThe Bible will be read closely in its own right and as an enduring resource for literature and commentary. The course will cover its forms and genres, including historical narrative, uncanny tales, prophecy, lyric, lament, commandment, sacred biography, and apocalypse; its pageant of weird and extraordinary characters; and its brooding intertextuality. Students will become familiar with a wide variety of biblical interpretations, from the Rabbis to Augustine, Kafka and Kierkegaard. Cinematic commentary will be included--Bible films, from the campy to the sublime. Two lectures, one preceptorial.