Global Arc

The course will focus on postcolonial writing from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which have come increasingly to be viewed as sites where issues of global import are conspicuously articulated. Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, questions to be discussed will feature some that loom especially large: the genesis of a distinct multiethnic and multilingual community; the phenomena of migration and diaspora; ongoing tensions between former colonies now incorporated, as peripheral departments, by the "center," that is, France and the European Union; and not least, the matter of geography and the environment.

Seminar draws on expertise of guest faculty from Princeton and elsewhere to provide a broad, multidisciplinary perspective on turning points in European culture from the late middle ages to the present. Gateway course for ECS and Contemporary European Politics and Society. Topics in literature, art, music, philosophy, political theory, history of science. One three-hour seminar.

Counter to received wisdom, it is in the Romantic period, not the 20th century, that war assumes its modern form as "total war." We will examine how literary, philosophical, and artistic Romanticisms grapple with this new phenomenon. Subtopics include: war, media, technology; landscape, spectatorship, and the sublime; cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the concept of Europe. Readings from Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Fichte, Clausewitz, Kleist, Stendhal, Austen, de Quincey, and Hazlitt, along with recent scholarship on this topic (Bell, Favret, Mieszkowski), and relevant critical theory (Freud, Butler).

The seminar explores concepts and representations of melancholy in ancient and pre-modern medicine, medieval theology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, European art since the Romantic era (painting, literature, and film), critical theory, social media, and ethnography. Course material has been chosen both for contextualization of melancholic (or depressive) condition in the history of European culture and for variety of interpretive approaches. Among major issues to be considered are the human experience of loss and the situation of the person in society.

What is the relationship between the modern media and violent crime? Murder is certainly a favorite topic of yellow journalism, but some would also argue that the media provoke criminal behavior through the very act of depicting it. By looking at how murder is "composed" in a number of popular media ranging from detective literature to crime scene photography, this seminar investigates the feedback loop between crime and its representation in modern life. While the course covers a variety of texts from the 19th century to the postwar period, the historical focus of the seminar will be the crime-obsessed culture of Weimar Germany.

How did modernist writers around the world imagine and represent other worlds in relation to their own? How were tangled lines of connection and disjuncture, locality, inter- and outer-nationality, movement and stasis, given form in different places and situations? Does this have anything to do with the specificity of what we call "modernism" in literature? Can modernism sabotage a globalizing modernity? We trace lines of (dis)connection--from Harlem to Paris to a wider black diaspora encompassing Africa and the Caribbean; from England to the Americas; below the nation in colonial India; and from the Antilles to Algeria to France.

Symbolic systems and social life in specific historical eras. Topics will vary. Recent courses include, for example, magic, art, and science in Renaissance culture, political discourse and nationalism, culture and inequality, history of technology, and the rhetoric of new media.

Symbolic systems and social life in specific historical eras. Topics will vary. Recent courses include, for example, magic, art, and science in Renaissance culture, political discourse and nationalism, culture and inequality, history of technology, and the rhetoric of new media.

What does it mean for a film to be embedded in a local tradition, language, and landscape, while being challenged by a global culture with an increasingly homogenized taste for the films of Hollywood? With the help of Nossiter's 2004 provocative documentary, Mondovino, we will explore the possible analogy between the theory of terroir (a sense of place) in wine production and a theory of local-vernacular filmmaking by comparing classical Hollywood studio films with films of Italian Neo-Realism and works by the highly controversial Danish filmmakers Vinterberg and von Trier.

Increasing numbers of people across the world hate the West. We will look in detail at intellectual genealogies of anti-Westernism in Germany and Russia and different ideas of the "West" before branching out to other regions (especially the Islamic Middle East).