Global Arc

This course will focus through stories and essays the issues of violence, alienation, justice, dignity, punishment, conscience, economic inequality, redemption and transformation. It will examine these issues through the lens of great creative writers, as well as the creative writing of students.

This course explores ideas of individual ethics and political community, the ethics of political rule, freedom and slavery, democracy and representation, and equality and inequality in political thought. Readings will be drawn from both canonical and contemporary authors, including Sophocles, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. This is an introductory course, which emphasizes both thematic and historical approaches to political theory, and its role in informing contemporary civic engagement.

An introduction to the classical myths in their cultural context and in their wider application to human concerns (such as creation, sex and gender, identity, transformation, and death). The course will offer a who's who of the ancient imaginative world, study the main ancient sources of well known stories, and introduce modern approaches to analyzing myths.

This course invites students to consider not just what poems mean but how they mean - and how that "how" complicates, challenges, obscures, enlivens, or collides with the task of translation. We will look at forms of poetry that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what translation is. Examples include poems written in made-up languages; unstable texts; homophonic and visual translation; erasure poetics; and multilingual poems. Exploring the places where poetry and translation meet (or diverge), we will put traditional concepts of originality and derivation to the test.

What does it mean to believe a poem? To believe in a poem? Can a poem itself have, or carry, beliefs--moral, religious, political, scientific? We often take poetry to be a space of ambiguity and play, where certainty is suspended, but it is also a uniquely powerful form of speech, and has long been used for credos, manifestos, prayers. These are the questions of our seminar, questions we will pursue with the help both of poets (Milton, Dickinson, Moten) and philosophers (Popper, Ricoeur, Anscombe). The seminar will move back and forth between poetry of past and present, between the beliefs of others and our own.

This course examines the theory and practice of punishment in the US. Over the past 30 years, US incarceration rates have soared. Princeton students, alongside incarcerated students, together will ask why and how we punish; who really constitutes the "we" doing the punishing; why a gap might exist between the theory and practice of punishment; and what might be done. The course, organized through PTI and UCHV, involves weekly travel to and from a New Jersey correctional facility and intensive, collaborative discussions between Princeton and Rutgers students.