Global Arc

Junior Independent Work requires students to complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. The work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the semester. See below for details on works-in-progress submissions and due dates.

How have French writers sought to portray the experience of illness, medicine, and the modern hospital in recent years? What role, if any, does literature adopt, as its own form of knowledge and healing, in trying to care for sick bodies and diagnose the failings of the medical system itself? How might literature and medicine enrich each other? Short works by key modern writers on topics ranging from mental health, autism, and eating disorders to organ transplants, AIDS, abortion, and disability. Brief background readings in the medical humanities. Class is writing-intensive and discussion-centered to improve French language skills.

This course investigates self-centered forms like autobiography, autofiction, the confession, the memoir, the diary, and forms that many writers have used to explore the self, including lyric poetry, correspondence, bande-dessinée, essay, travel narrative, fragment, interview, etc. Through canonical and lesser-known works written in French from the 18th century to today, we will seek to answer the questions: How does one preserve one's own personhood, memories, identity, and experiences in writing? Which techniques have writers used to do so? How has self-writing changed over time?

This interdisciplinary course explores the rich history of photography in France, beginning with the work of early inventors (Niépce's heliographie, Daguerre's daguerréotype, Lumière's vues photographiques animées) and practitioners (Atget, Nadar). We will read important theories and literary texts in which photography plays a central role and will study portraits, landscapes, ethnographic, journalistic, medical, experimental, and documentary photographs, and other genres by French and Francophone photographers from the 19th century to today.

Democratizing Culture will look at the initiatives by French cultural institutions to democratize culture and make their offerings more accessible to everyone. In recent years, major French cultural institutions have tried to engineer ways to attract a more socio-economically diverse audience to their halls, galleries, and venues. Encouraged by the Ministry of Culture, new projects have emerged in the world of theater, music, the opera, and museums. During spring break, we will travel to France to have a first-hand experience and assessment of these cultural policies and meet with government officials and arts institutions' directors.

This course offers an introduction to film studies as well as a space for discussing the issues of race, multiculturalism and otherness in the French context. Students will learn to watch films critically, honing their linguistic and rhetorical skills through workshops and brief assignments. While we will survey prominent works, directors, actors, genres, and aesthetic movements in French cinema, the course will also strive to decenter the "canon" by showcasing thought-provoking and esthetically groundbreaking movies made in the last two decades by filmmakers themselves of very diverse backgrounds.

Since its inception, cinema has always made use of a variety of texts (including scripts, plays, novels, short stories, tales, and comics) while raising crucial questions: Why retell a story that is already well-known? What makes a good adaptation? How faithful must an adaptation be? When does adaptation become appropriation? Engaging comparatively with the books and their transformations into movies, we will explore such questions through a wide range of topics, genres, and texts (for most belonging to the French and Francophone canon), examine their (in)adaptability as well as the debates around it, and assess the artists' creativity.

Throughout early modern Europe, and in France in particular, literary, and linguistic reinvention coincided with, and was perhaps inextricable from, the beginnings of European global imperialism and nationalism. This course serves as an introduction to the development, politics, and aesthetics of early modern French literary practices as they are contextualized in this global colonial history. By examining a number of early modern texts of a variety of genres-travel narratives, linguistic manifestoes, poetry, dialogues, and essays-this course will explore interconnections between the development of the French language and imperialism.

Each new technology generates its own set of apprehensions, expressed through opinion pieces, literature, film, art, and public debates. This course surveys fearful responses to technologies such as print, electricity, radio, telegraph, telephone, photography, robots and automatons, the automobile, chemical warfare, the atom bomb, cloning, drones, IVF and technologies of reproduction, GMOs, mechanization, surveillance technologies, cell phones, the Minitel and Internet, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc. What patterns can be found in these fears? How have writers and artists channeled these in their work?

This course focuses on developments of the past thirty years in French and francophone literature (the francophone component including Martinique, Guadeloupe, Senegal, Canada, and Vietnam). It examines especially-in contexts informed by issues of class, gender, race, migration, and generation-multiple ways in which a self is constituted and evolves in relation to other selves, to groups, and to history. The texts to be read include both fiction and nonfiction of an autobiographical inflection. Emphasis will be placed not only on substantive relational questions but also on the formal literary resources of which these authors make use.