Global Arc

A survey (in English) of three influential schools of 20th-century Russian literary criticism: the major Russian formalists (1920s); Mikhail Bakhtin (1920s-70s), and the cultural semiotics of Yury Lotman and his "Tartu School" (1960s-80s). The course will include both primary and secondary texts; major essays will be read in conjunction with sample literature that illustrates the critical approach. Two 90-minute seminars.

An examination of explicit and implicit accounts of the origin of language and the necessity of these to the larger literary and theoretical practices and projects they inform.

This course begins by examining portraits at the Princeton University Art Museum to develop a basic understanding of portraiture, moving then thematically through topics such as: Velázquez, Kings, Buffoons, Hangers on at Court; Zen portraits of China and Japan; Representing Nefertiti in the Workshop of Thutmose; Encaustic portraits from Roman Egypt; Rembrandt by Rembrandt; Avedon/Warhol. For comparative purposes, we consider literary and musical portraits, too. The course interrogates relationships among resemblance, self-staging, identity, ethics and aesthetics in a broad cultural context.

Kant's response to the question, "What is Enlightenment?", posed in the Berlin Monthly in 1783, continued to arouse debate, as Foucault's late return to Kant made plain. We will examine many of the formative texts of modern political and moral philosophy written during an era when the very concept of "the human" was interrogated as never before. In that they presume no extra-human foundation, these works turn out to be fundamentally interdisciplinary in reach, and include theories of government, knowledge, language, property, contractual and transnational rights. Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant are among the authors we read.

Literary plots involving social and erotic ambition, examined in novels from the seventeenth century to the present, as well as in films and other genres. Topics include: social climbing and descent; the marriage plot and queer alternatives to it; ambition and longing as narrative engines; the family and social order; criminals, outlaws, and rivals to the family; social class and selfhood; the relationship between gender, sexuality, and narrative structure.

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 modes, philosophies, imaginative and figural writing, and theory and practice of the plastic arts.

Lyric poetry has the uncanny capacity to surprise, and so inscribe itself in the mental life of its reader. This course aims at rendering that inscription indelible by uncovering some of the sources of surprise in the language and form of Renaissance through Romantic lyric works. First of a 2-semester sequence. Second semester on Modern Lyric. Either semester may be taken separately.

This course is the continuation of a 2-semester sequence for undergraduates and graduate students, but may be taken independently of the fall semester course (COM 421). We will focus on reading major poets of the modern period in English, French, German and Spanish with additional readings in the theoretical reflections on modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Pax, Borges, Stevens, Bishop and Ashbery, among others. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and poets.

This course follows the development of modern Hebrew prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How was Hebrew refashioned from a liturgical to a modern literary language capable of narrating novels and conveying contemporary dialogue? Who were the revolutionary writers who accomplished this feat and what ideological struggles accompanied it? We will begin with the haskala (Jewish enlightenment), continue with the tehiya (revival) and early writing in the yishuv (Jewish community in pre-State Palestine), and conclude with dor ha-medina (the "independence generation") and maturation of modern Hebrew. Reading knowledge of Hebrew required.

This course explores Cervantes' seminal text from literary, historical, philosophical, medical and visual perspectives.