Global Arc

Explores the "individual" as produced through European rituals that crosscut national boundaries, yet grow out of particular local, regional, and national cultures. How is the individual formed in the rituals of modern expressive culture? What are the functions of dance, music, visual culture, political culture, local festivals, and sport? What are the rites of passage, consumption activities, free time (vacations, tourism), and work cultures? The course will analyze empirical cases and select social theoretical frames that try to explain the emergence and development of "the individual" in modern European life. One three-hour seminar.

Before the naked city and joyless streets was the garden. This is its plot. Originally it was a "pleasant place," beyond which, in space and time, sprouted thorn and thistle. Later, much later, perhaps when it was already too late, came landscape (is it a noun or a verb, or both?). This course traces a serpentine path through the history of landscape, with occasional and revealing vistas to and from literature, the arts, and the sciences. "Down the Garden Path" suggests being taken in, willingly falling prey to the ruses that await us in the garden, and which are masked by its pleasures.

Seminar examines the origins of animation in art and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The class will focus on issues of agency, affect, empathy, projection and other psychological reactions occasioned by inanimate objects as they are probed by major figures in art and architectural historiography, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychoanalysis and film theory. Seminar will also analyze specific case studies from modernist avant-garde and architectural movements in Germany and France during the first half of the last century.

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.