Courses
Graduate Courses
Spring 2023
ART 571/ENG 590/AAS 571 Frequencies of Black Life The seminar takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life's frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life's irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility? Instructor(s): Tina Marie Campt
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
COM 553/ENG 546/GSS 554 The Eighteenth Century in Europe Recontextualizing the `Rise of the Novel': We revisit dominant Anglocentric accounts of the novel's origins in a wider European context, reading 17th-18th century fiction & criticism; reconsider "the novel" as a narrative epistemology of character competing with other genres (history, romance, drama); trace its development from a hybrid of earlier popular forms to an established literary genre, now the predominant one, in response to profound shifts in conceptions of gender, identity, literature, probability, sensibility, epistemology, the rise of the middle class, the nuclear family, industrialism, individualism, and colonialism. Instructor(s): April Alliston
Section(s):
S01 10:00 AM - 12:50 PM W
EAS 551/ENG 588/COM 548/HUM 551 Submergent Opacities: Critical Ecologies of Relation This seminar explores the confluences among Japanese, Black, and Indigenous thought in both creative and critical modalities. Through the uncharted encounters among Pacific and Caribbean discourses of ecological reimagining, the course surfaces the generative potentials of a planetary and comparative humanities. Participants develop creative/critical engagements with diverse scholarly approaches and collaborative experimentations with textual, audio-visual, and place-based forms of expression. Together, we trace the speculative archipelagoes that sound out shared but disparate genealogies of anti-colonial inquiry. Instructor(s): Franz K. Prichard
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
ENG 550 The Romantic Period: Romanticism and Revolution The Romantic period, spanning from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Reform era of the 1830s was an age of revolutions in multiple registers, on multiple fronts: political, poetical, polemical, cultural. Our course engages some of the excitements in the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas DeQuincey. Our focus is on literary actions, reactions, formations and reforms, and risks and adventures, in the context of the age's ferments: the rights of man, or woman; abolitions polemics; and imagination's innovations. Instructor(s): Susan Jean Wolfson
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
ENG 563 Poetics: Poetry, Law and the PoetiX of Justice in Forensic Landscapes The course invites us to think of borderlands where law and poetry intersect. What the law excises in its pursuit of justice, poetry cherishes as essential. Within a global context of literature we ask: how do the many and varied mother tongues of poetry that will not be silent confront the law's exorbitant capacities through which human becomes chattel and homeland wasteland? What does it mean to live in landscapes made forensic through the legacy of unlawful acts carried out under colour of law? In the poetiX of justice, X marks the place/s where crime jostles with evidence, history and memory as well as the unknown--the terrain of poetry. Instructor(s): M. NourbeSe NourbeSe Irma Philip
Section(s):
S01 09:00 AM - 11:50 AM W
ENG 567 Special Studies in Modernism: Modernist Life Writings The course attempts at once to isolate the distinctive character of modernist life writings and locate them within a specific cluster of psychological concerns and historical/social/cultural preoccupations. We explore how our writers/biographers defined their relation to their familial as well as cultural past; how they devised untraditional and singular forms to represent their own experience or those of their chosen subjects; how they shouldered their burdens as self-chroniclers or historians of loss, especially of self-loss. Instructor(s): Maria A. DiBattista
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM M
ENG 568 Criticism and Theory: The Human Ornament (II): The Asian American Edition This course explores the material and metaphysical conflation between Asiatic persons and Asiatic things in Western aesthetic and cultural imagination. How does the technologies of material nova from the discovery of Chinese porcelain in the 14th century to the invention of cybernetics in the 21st century shape the artisanal project of race and gender making for Asian Americans? What does it mean to survive as an object? Instructor(s): Anne Cheng
Section(s):
S01 09:00 AM - 11:50 AM T
ENG 571/COM 592/ARC 589/MOD 570/HUM 570 Literary and Cultural Theory: Architectures of Theory This class engages with spatial analysis across a range of disciplines and approaches; from architecture, architectural theory and manifestos to continental philosophy, Marxism, Black studies, decolonial writings, and a sample of graphic- and novelistic depictions of built space. We ask whether thinking about built space as a "language" is fundamentally different from "picturing" space or inhabiting space with our bodies, and whether these approaches count as "cognitive mapping." We contemplate the dystopian actualities and utopian possibilities inherent in the built environment and the constructive projects of world building. Instructor(s): Andrew Cole
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
ENG 573 Problems in Literary Study: Making Books This for-credit class combines making books with the study of books as fruit of all sorts of labor. Meeting in Firestone's Special Collections, students learn how to set type, print with an historic Albion Press, and hand-sew chapbooks of poems written by English Department poets, with the guidance of printer David Sellers. Seminars begin with presentations about books in Special Collections, from the Gutenberg Bible up to modernist little magazines and modern book arts. Instructor(s): Claudia L. Johnson
Section(s):
S01 10:00 AM - 12:50 PM M
ENG 574/HIS 591/HOS 591/HUM 574 Literature and Society: New Schools New Schools surveys experiments in para- and counter-institutional higher education over the last century, from Black Mountain to Outer Coast to Deep Springs. Why do experimental schools arise, flourish, fossilize, fail? What are the epistemic, social, and political implications of departures from pedagogical norms? We approach these new schools as historians, critics, and teachers (and students); we study their records, try their methods, and we may well build our own. The seminar responds to the crisis of opportunity in higher education and to the perpetual call for new ways to teach and learn. Instructor(s): D. Graham Burnett, Jeff Dolven
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W
ENG 581 Seminar in Pedagogy Required weekly seminar for all English Department PhD students teaching for the first time at Princeton and scheduled to precept during the Spring 2023 semester. Balancing pedagogical theory with practical tips and collaborative discussion, the seminar helps students meet the challenges of their first semester in the classroom while also preparing them to lead their own courses. Topics include: integrated course design (preparing lesson plans; leading discussions; lecturing; teaching writing; assessment and grading); writing recommendations; and managing students, faculty, and time. Instructor(s): Sarah A. Chihaya, Diana Jean Fuss
Section(s):
S01 03:00 PM - 04:20 PM Th
ENG 797 Beautiful Experiments No description available Instructor(s): Monica Huerta
Section(s):
S01 01:00 AM - 01:00 AM
GER 532/ENG 589/COM 523 Topics in Literary Theory and History: Theories of the Modern European Novel The modern European novel has been haunted by the accusation of illegitimacy. From its eighteenth-century inception onward, the uncomfortable place of the novel among the poetic genres inherited from antiquity has solicited an unparalleled intensity of critical reflection. This course examines several 'classical' and contemporary meditations on the novel, alongside close consideration of three representative early examples. We will probe the uses and disadvantages of generic distinctions at the intersection of literary history and literary theory. Instructor(s): Joel Benjamin Lande, Nikolaus Wegmann
Section(s):
S01 07:00 PM - 09:50 PM W