Global Arc

Is it possible to be authentic today, in the age of social media influencers, deep fakes, cultural appropriation, corporate advertising, globalization, and artificial intelligence? Over the centuries, many have created works about their struggles with remaining authentic despite powerful outside influences. This introductory comparative literature course is a broad survey of how authenticity has been understood across time and space. Students will develop their skills in comparative close reading of short, engaging stories while writing about the problem of authenticity in their own lives.

The first Junior Paper in Comparative Literature is a close reading of a non-English language literary text (poem, short story, or excerpt of longer work), advised by a Princeton faculty member. Its purpose is to demonstrate facility in reading and interpreting texts in that language while developing a critical idiom for literary analysis. The completed essay, around 3000-3500 words, requires sustained investment and attention throughout the semester.

This interdisciplinary seminar will explore questions of nihilism, utopia, the state, and political violence in works by artists like Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Signac, and writings by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.

From its earliest decades, cinema was bound up with revolutionary struggle. Working at the nexus of theory and practice, in the twentieth century, radical filmmakers from disparate linguistic and national contexts found common ground in film form as a vehicle for anti-colonial struggle, developing an aesthetics of liberation intended not just to represent the world on screen, but to transform it. This seminar will chart a course through revolutionary cinema of Latin America, Africa, and Asia and explore the ways in which filmmakers outside the West developed revolutionary anti-colonial politics in a cinematic idiom.

What is the view from nowhere? What does the world look like from places rendered invisible-or made to disappear? After 1989, the collapse of the three-world system gave way to a North/South binary in which the former socialist Second World seemed to vanish from the map. This course reads fiction from Eastern Europe and Eurasia as a record of that disappearance, tracing how writers register postsocialist transformation through exile, memory, and linguistic estrangement while engaging broader debates in world literature on form, circulation, and uneven development.

Introduction to the historical and comparative grammar via a reading of pre-classical texts, some literary (Saturnian poetry, Ennius, Cato) and many nonliterary (especially Archaic inscriptions). A focus will be the position of Latin among the linguistically related languages of ancient Italy, which will include reading in those languages. We will explore developments of the literary language down to republican epic. You will become familiar with historical grammar, will learn to assess etymologies, and will gain an appreciation for a wide range of literary language from carmina to ritual texts in Umbrian and beyond.

This course focuses on prose and poetry of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the Roman Empire. This was a cosmopolitan and vibrant period for literature during which Roman authors tried to navigate a new political reality with all of its opportunities and dangers. We will read authors reacting to or carefully ignoring the Julio-Claudian and Flavian imperial houses, bad emperors and good ones. Our goal is to understand these texts within their cultural, political, and literary context. This will include close reading of the Latin, and an introduction to the historical period and modern scholarship.

In 8 CE, Ovid was banished from Rome under mysterious circumstances. On the coast of the Black Sea, he wrote poetry that reflected on and sought reprieve from his exile. For centuries afterwards, poets who found themselves in states of exile or alienation used these works as models for Latin poems that made sense of their lot. In the first half of this class, we will read deeply from Ovid's works. Then, we will turn to poets from Late Antiquity into modernity who drew from them. Our reading will help us think about the relationship between poetry and home, questions of genre in Latin poetry, and the human experience of exile.

Tacitus' Annals has long been read with an eye towards the machinations of Roman emperors and the thrum of life across the Roman empire. But Tacitus remained remarkably interested in the peoples beyond the empire's borders. Together the scattered chapters in his Annals on Parthia form a coherent book. In this class we will closely read Tacitus' Parthian narratives to critically assess Tacitean ethnography. Each session we will read between 2-4 chapters of the Annals paying close attention to its prose style, historiographic strategies, and its piercing view of a Roman empire confronted with its equal.

This course focuses on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Monkey), some of its central themes, and its long history of adaptation across media, regional and historical boundaries. We read a good part of the 100-chapter novel, investigate some of the texts that preceded it, and look at the illustrations, comics, rewritings, films, and videogames that it inspired. If Monkey represents the spirit of play and the ability to change at will, how does remediation ask us to think about this in terms of media and philosophy, politics and language? When and how does adaptation turn into appropriation?