Global Arc

The course will deal with a theme, author, or problem in comparative literature studies.

"Zen and Performance" will explore the links between Zen practice and monastic life on the one hand, and several Japanese arts on the other (specifically: ink painting, Noh drama, Shakuhachi performance, tea ceremony, linked verse composition, etc.).

What is a literary character? The class aims to question and go beyond the idea that 'characters' in fiction are psychologically real entities whose function is to provoke empathy or moral judgment. What does it mean to 'identify' with a literary character? What alternatives are there to identification? The class will take transhistorical and comparative literary examples that cover various permutations (e.g. allegory, psychological realism, narration/focalization), and cover philosophically inflected theories of character from Aristotle to Roland Barthes.

A survey (in English) of three influential schools of 20th-century Russian literary criticism: the major Russian formalists (1920s); Mikhail Bakhtin (1920s-70s), and the cultural semiotics of Yury Lotman and his "Tartu School" (1960s-80s). The course will include both primary and secondary texts; major essays will be read in conjunction with sample literature that illustrates the critical approach. Two 90-minute seminars.

An examination of explicit and implicit accounts of the origin of language and the necessity of these to the larger literary and theoretical practices and projects they inform.

This course begins by examining portraits at the Princeton University Art Museum to develop a basic understanding of portraiture, moving then thematically through topics such as: Velázquez, Kings, Buffoons, Hangers on at Court; Zen portraits of China and Japan; Representing Nefertiti in the Workshop of Thutmose; Encaustic portraits from Roman Egypt; Rembrandt by Rembrandt; Avedon/Warhol. For comparative purposes, we consider literary and musical portraits, too. The course interrogates relationships among resemblance, self-staging, identity, ethics and aesthetics in a broad cultural context.

Kant's response to the question, "What is Enlightenment?", posed in the Berlin Monthly in 1783, continued to arouse debate, as Foucault's late return to Kant made plain. We will examine many of the formative texts of modern political and moral philosophy written during an era when the very concept of "the human" was interrogated as never before. In that they presume no extra-human foundation, these works turn out to be fundamentally interdisciplinary in reach, and include theories of government, knowledge, language, property, contractual and transnational rights. Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant are among the authors we read.

Literary plots involving social and erotic ambition, examined in novels from the seventeenth century to the present, as well as in films and other genres. Topics include: social climbing and descent; the marriage plot and queer alternatives to it; ambition and longing as narrative engines; the family and social order; criminals, outlaws, and rivals to the family; social class and selfhood; the relationship between gender, sexuality, and narrative structure.

In-depth discussion and analysis of conceptions of the sensory in writings by philosophers, poets, art critics and theorists, and artists, from the early modern to contemporary periods. We will investigate the ways in which the sensory is understood as the necessary basis for conceptual thinking of diverse kinds, including systematic and dialectical modes, philosophies, imaginative and figural writing, and theory and practice of the plastic arts.

Lyric poetry has the uncanny capacity to surprise, and so inscribe itself in the mental life of its reader. This course aims at rendering that inscription indelible by uncovering some of the sources of surprise in the language and form of Renaissance through Romantic lyric works. First of a 2-semester sequence. Second semester on Modern Lyric. Either semester may be taken separately.