Global Arc

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 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.

The young Irish novelist Sally Rooney is widely seen as the writer who best expresses the anxieties and hopes of her generation in the western world. Her three novels - Conversations with Friends (2017); Normal People (2018); and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) - have sold millions of copies and explored sexuality, friendship, communication, social class and inequality. In this seminar course, we explore Rooney's work in the context of the recent and remarkable flowering of fiction by Irish women.

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 looks at the construction of "Chinatown" -- as historic reality, geographic formation, architectural invention, and cultural fantasy -- in the heart of America. We will study novels, plays, films, and photography that focus on or use Chinatown as a central backdrop -or even as a conspicuous absence -- in ways that highlight the complex relationship between material history and social imagination when it comes to how America incorporates, or fails to digest, its racial or immigrant "others".