Global Arc

To know a poem well is to make it your own and to learn something about how poems are made. In this class you will learn many great poems well. You will learn about the techniques and history of this art form as we consider significant changes in the history of lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems and think about poets' uses of voice, diction, image, trope, form, occasion, sequence, and closure. We will be reading poems together and writing about them, making poems and imitations of our own, and learning poems by heart.

The making and interpretation of fictions are among our everyday activities, whether or not we realize it; however, we don't always consider what "fiction" is, or what it means. This course will introduce students to the diverse and specific forms storytelling and invention take in literature, with emphasis on the novel and film. We will interrogate the act of creating fictions, and the impact a fictional world can make on a reader. Along the way, we will continually consider two deceptively simple questions: what does fiction do to us? What can fiction do for us?

Is the underworld a world unto itself, or does it only acquire meaning in relation to the world above? Or is it the other way around -- that our world acquires its deepest, most difficult meanings, in relation to the abyss? The underworlds we'll encounter--some cast in the epic tradition; others, modern underworlds of slavery, criminality, racism, prison, or concentration camp--are all recognizably versions of the world above. We'll explore the writing of underworlds as a revisionary, as well as visionary enterprise, sounding the depths for critiques (and satires) of power, authority, divinity, racism, misogyny, or simply everyday life.

This course draws on the talent and the practice of the distinguished writers who work at Princeton.

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Why are we fascinated with the change from youth to adulthood? What features do stories about this period share, and how is this transition imagined across time periods and genres? Together we will read novels, short stories, and contemporary memoirs that explore what it means to grow up, leave home, find adventure, encounter disappointment, return to one's origins, and reflect on what it means to change.

An exploration of the ideas, issues, and aesthetic values that mark the development of science fiction from the 18th century to the present, with particular attention to the ways specific texts confront the philosophical questions underlying scientific inquiry and invention, travel in time and space, the creation of life, robots and robotics. The ways in which this genre reframes the basic question of what it means to be human will be the foundation of our analysis of contemporary short stories and representative novels.

This course studies the entanglement between ideas of personhood and the history of ideas about beauty. How does beauty make and unmake persons -socially, legally and culturally- at the intersection of race, gender and aesthetics? Let us move beyond the good versus bad binary that dominates discussions of beauty to focus instead on how beauty in literature and culture have contributed to the conceptualization of modern, western personhood and its inverse (the inhuman, the inanimate, the object). We will trace beauty and its disruptions in the arenas of literature, visual culture, global capitalism, politics, law, science and technology.

This course will explore representations of crime (mainly but not only murder) in a range of American and European texts and films. We will look at amateur and professional detectives, crime scenes, gangsters, methods of investigation, theories of the criminal mind, and what we might think of as the sociology of fictional crime. What is the nature of this persistent, international interest in wrongdoing on the page and on the screen? Even and especially on the part of people who have no interest in real-life crime. There may be just too many answers to this question, but that's not a bad reason for asking it.

Why do songs mean so much to us, and how do they deliver pleasure? Do lyrics matter? It is often assumed that poetry was originally always sung. This course interrogates the collaboration between words and music, and entertains the notion that each is potentially a threat to the other. We will consider popular song in many modes and some art song since 1945, as well as the broader relationship between literature and music in these years, and the role of song in historic events. We will investigate recording technology and will be visited by songwriters, recording engineers, electronic musicians, and the odd rock star.