Global Arc

A close study of the works of one or two authors. May include Austen, Dickinson, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, James, Stevens, or Woolf, among others. One three-hour seminar.

A close study of the works of one or two authors. May include Austen, Dickinson, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, James, Stevens, or Woolf, among others. One three-hour seminar.

A close study of the works of one or two authors. May include Austen, Dickinson, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, James, Stevens, or Woolf, among others. One three-hour seminar.

Courses offered under this rubric will investigate ethical questions in literature. Topics will range from a critical study of the textual forms these questions take to a historical study of an issue traditionally debated by both literature and ethics (responsibility, rhetoric, justice, violence, oppression). Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Approaches to the connections between literature and nationality, focusing either on literatures outside the Anglo-American experience or on the theoretical issues involved in articulating nationality through literature. Two 90-minute seminars.

Approaches to the connections between literature and nationality, focusing either on literatures outside the Anglo-American experience or on the theoretical issues involved in articulating nationality through literature. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The "art of losing isn't hard to master," claims modern poet Elizabeth Bishop. Humans write elegies because we are shredded by loss. Yet, the genre of elegy in English isn't easy to account for. This course starts where English does--in the Anglo-Saxon period. Old English lyrics, prose reflections, and the epic Beowulf are searing witnesses to yearning and regret. Paradoxically, these texts celebrate loss, even as they console. What could be mourned, and who grieve? What is this "English" sense of loss? In readings comparative and critical, we'll discover how millenium-old speakers comprehended and perhaps mastered their losses.

In conjunction with University College London, this topic course addresses a range of topics, including the role of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality in the social dynamics of London life. Students will be considering works that represent the city in terms of the longing for kinds of relation that the city promises but may withhold. We will consider London as a city of neighborhoods, a national and imperial metropolis, a postcolonial and global city. By attending to our texts in their historical contexts and in relation to one another, we will be exploring writing about London that is as restless as the city itself.

From eighteenth-century society portraits to selfies, Anglo-American culture seems nearly ceaselessly obsessed with rendering the human form--face and body--whether of the self or of another. In this course focused on literary and visual portraiture from the eighteenth century to the present and taught largely in the Princeton University Art Museum, we will look at texts and objects side by side in an attempt to get closer to a definition of what portraiture is, what it does, how we come to know it when we see it, and what the genre says about conceptions of the self and others across axes of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

Brexit is the defining problem for British culture and politics in the contemporary moment. This course will read twenty-first century British literature and popular culture through the lens that Brexit provides, as well as reading Brexit through the lenses of earlier historical, political, and cultural touchstones from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will look at recent works of poetry and fiction alongside film, pop music, and cultural criticism of the last fifty years to ask: what is and was "Britain" in the long lead-up to Brexit, and what might it look like in the future?