Global Arc

Food, like books, can sustain and celebrate life. But also like books, food can serve as an agent and expression for discipline, fear, hunger, and loss. This course explores both the joyful and the dark sides of eating and traces how "taste" informs the various ways in which we ingest the world. We will consider how the meeting of food and word (in novels, poems, plays, and the cinema) informs large social categories and notions such as the nation, gender, race, ecology, family, and sophistication.

How do American writers represent diverse and fluid identities in the new millennium? How does the literary imagination engage new views of sexuality and gender, respond to political and personal violence, and confront racial, social, and economic injustice? This course explores these questions in recent works by Adichie, Alexie, Bechdel, Morrison, and others.

This new interdisciplinary 200 level course offers a broad introduction to the study of Irish literature, history and culture. Students will gain a grounding in: Irish storytelling since the early Christian period, including through music and song; the history of the conquest of Ireland and Irish independence movements; the role of the Irish language in culture; the famine and its social and political aftermath; the history of religious difference; the relationship between Britain and Ireland; the work of major literary figures such as Swift, Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and Heaney; contemporary Ireland and the Irish economy.

This course is an introduction to Indigenous Literature. The underlying conviction of the course is that the study of Indigenous literatures offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. Readings primarily consist of American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian authors, yet we also place these authors in the context of the global phenomenon of indigeneity and settler colonialism. The syllabus encourages us to wonder how Indigenous authors across time and space are in conversation, or can be put into conversation, with each other.

Emphasis upon the preparation and delivery of expository and persuasive speeches before audiences composed of the speaker's fellow students. Consultations with the instructor, readings in textbooks, and written analyses of speeches supplement frequent practice in speaking. One 90-minute lecture, two classes.

This course offers a survey of the varieties of animation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as their critical reception. Animation is a ubiquitous form, present across media and in advertising. Many viewers take its components and effects for granted. But the archive of animation fundamentally complicates any easy assumptions about "realism" in the twentieth century; animation, moreover, challenges assumptions about bodies and their functions, exaggerating their features and functions, promoting alternatives to more mundane notions of life and liveliness, and relatedly, to ideas of time, contingency, and experience.

How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.

A poem moves, and sings, and paints pictures; it tells stories, it takes the stage, and it can play like a movie on the inside of the eyelids. This course explores what poetry can do by considering the powers it shares with neighboring kinds of making, both their expressive potentials and their technical resources. In collaboration with a wide variety of guests from Princeton's arts programs, and by means of a mix of practical and critical exercises, students will rethink the place of poetry in culture and society, historically and into the future.

An introduction to the forms and meanings of American television, with an emphasis on watching, thinking, and writing critically about the medium. We will examine a range of structures, styles, and strategies specific to television, including episodic storytelling, the advent of streaming and "peak TV," and the role of television in establishing and sometimes disrupting norms of identity, politics, and aesthetics. The main approach throughout will be close analysis of specific genres, series, and episodes informed by the histories, contexts, and practices that make American television such a significant part of American culture.

This course offers an overview of comic drama, from the Greeks to the present. We'll focus on comedy's relation to festival culture, its interest in the fluidity of human identity (often telegraphed by its deployment of disguise), and its obsession with the relationship between love and money.