Global Arc

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.

This 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.

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?

The Modern movement in English fiction, from Conrad and Joyce to the present. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Epic poetry is like a blockbuster film (with war, sex, downfall, exaltation) and was considered "the best and most accomplished kind of poetry" in the Renaissance. Four-hundred years later, its greatest practitioners are rarely read. Our course aims to compensate for this neglect by immersing students in the greatest eddies of epic activity from two interrelated vantage points. First, Milton's Paradise Lost, that culmination of the entire (neo)classical epic tradition. And second, disability studies, which interrogates how certain physical and mental features (often coded as deviations from the able-bodied norm) become stigmatized.

A 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.

A study of modern American writings, from Faulkner to Diaz, that emphasize the interplay between formal experimentation and thematic diversity. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An exploration of contemporary speculative fiction, with particular attention to the ways specific texts of the past fifty years have transformed science fiction into a richly imaginative literary form that challenges basic assumptions about the possibilities and limitations of human life. Our analysis of texts will focus on both the literary achievement and philosophical underpinnings of recent depictions of imagined futures, racial and gender identity, travels in time and space, and contacts with aliens, robots, and androids.

An 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.

With 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.