Global Arc

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.

How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields - Creative Writing, Visual Art, Theater, Dance, and Music - under the guidance of professionals. Two-week units introduce each field and involve "lab" experience in each. In class, we will focus on the basic principles of aesthetics, with the ultimate goal of designing, collaborating on, and critiquing original projects across disciplines and media. Full attendance is mandatory.

This class will focus on the career-long writing about jazz, blues, rock and R&B of Amiri Baraka (nee Leroi Jones) and the significant impact it has had on cultural politics, scholarship and esthetics from the early 1960s to the present. Baraka's work as an activist and his gifts as a poet/novelist/playwright/political essayist allowed him to inject considerable lyricism, eloquence, learning and passion into the previously moribund fields of African American music history and journalism. His music writing also affected the tenor of future public advocacy for jazz via the NEA 's Jazz Masters awards and Jazz At Lincoln Center.

Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Each student is expected to prepare a manuscript each week. There will be a weekly workshop meeting and occasional individual conferences.

Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Each student is expected to prepare a manuscript each week. There will be a weekly workshop meeting and occasional individual conferences.

Practice in the original composition of fiction supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Each student is expected to prepare a manuscript at least every other week. There will be a weekly workshop meeting and occasional individual conferences.

Practice in the original composition of fiction supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Each student is expected to prepare a manuscript at least every other week. There will be a weekly workshop meeting and occasional individual conferences.

Practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Each student is expected to prepare a manuscript each week. There will be a weekly workshop meeting and occasional individual conferences.