Program in LiteratureGlobal Cultures & Theory Program in Literature Fall 2024 Courses
Courses marked * are Major Requirements.
Courses marked ^ are taught by Core LIT Faculty.
LIT80S-01 Fire: The Storyteller^
Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh
TuTh 6:15 – 7:30PM
Friedl 102
The seminar provides an introductory approach to the figure of the storyteller and the temporal and spatial forms associated with this figure in different cultures including those of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The course considers collective practices of storytelling from indigenous and shamanic traditions in which the element of fire is considered the first storyteller; artisanal cultures in which craftsmen and travelers figure as carriers of the story; and the story’s modern and current media: the radio, WoW, Tumblr and TikTok.
LIT80S-02 Intro to Digital Cultures^
Taught by Professor Luciana Parisi
TuTh 10:05 – 11:20AM
Friedl 102
What is digital culture today? In the early 90s digital culture aimed to study how the internet shaped culture, the way we interact, think and communicate. In the first two decades of the 00s, digital culture has become more directly related to the emergence of social media platforms (from youtube to instagram, from snapchat to tiktok). Digital culture is now driven by apps, data profiling and recommendation algorithms. We visit iconic places through our constantly updating city apps. We construct our identity profiles by searching affinities with social media influencers. We make new friends through dating apps and by becoming followers. We know that biases of race, class, gender and sexuality are embedded in everyday search algorithms. This course draws on digital media theory to discuss how networks, feedback, interactivity entangle our everyday decisions, behaviours, and desires to our smart media. The course will ask whether and how digital media are affecting our understanding of subjectivity and the body, of sociality and collective actions, of political power and control. The course will reflect how we negotiate and challenge the gendering, sexualization and racialization of our digital persona in emoji as well as in virtual games. The course will also look at how hashtag culture brings together people to join political actions across borders, but also to divide people according to beliefs, trends and fandoms. From these discussions, the course will address how digital culture is shaped by artificial intelligence and will explore ideas about how we may now be seeing the world through the way machines see the world. From data-tracking to predictive algorithms, digital media are not simply tools that assist us but have increasingly become part of our everyday aesthetics: the way we perceive and experience the world is bound to how algorithms predict our preferences and quantify the frequency, content and meaning of data in the information space. This course welcomes students to participate in these emerging discussions and experiment with new ideas that are shaping digital culture today.
LIT89S-01 Woolf and Consciousness^
Taught by Professor Maya Kronfeld
TuTh 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 102
Woolf is both one of the central practitioners of the experimental literary style known as “stream of consciousness” fiction, and one of the authors to most daringly revise and even repudiate its terms. We will look at the philosophical and transnational literary history of stream of consciousness, and pair Woolf’s literary impressionism and post-impressionism with examples of similar trends in the visual arts (Monet, Cézanne) as well as music (Debussy, Ravel). We will inquire together whether Woolf’s narration of consciousness in fiction can prompt us to redraw our existing categories for the mind, or help us think about what we know, and about the conditions under which we know it.
LIT190S-01 Labor Aesthetics
Taught by Madeleine Collier
MW 4:40 – 5:55PM
Crowell 107
What does labor look like? How do the stories we tell about labor honor some kinds of work while diminishing or invisibilizing others? This course offers an introduction to fundamental questions of labor aesthetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through exploring a range of canonical and understudied labor art (including labor musicals, television shows, documentaries, and social media content), we will consider how form, genre, and narrative create political effects. We will engage relevant feminist and postcolonial theories of labor to situate each artwork in history, highlighting major production paradigms and labor movements.
LIT190S-02 Internet: Medium & Ideology
Taught by Mike Sockol
WF 3:05 – 4:20pm
Social Sciences 107
Based? Redpilled? Vibes? Manifesting? Cancel Culture? Cheugy? Situationship? Girl’s girls? Neopronouns? Radfems? Stans? Incels? Postmodern Neo-Marxism? Alt Right? Post-Left? Lana del Rey Ethel Cain Red Scare Cigarette Sad Girl Americana energy? Looksmaxxing? Soy? Wojack? Anarcho libertarian socialist primitivist fascism with Chinese characteristics? Just what the heck is going on online?
The Internet is an ubiquitous yet undertheorized medium. An indispensable cornerstone of advanced industrial economies, it functions as an advertising distribution apparatus, a symbolic exchange network, a data extraction infrastructure, a relationship facilitator, and a storage site, among many other things. The Internet has impacted economic, cultural, and social relations in ways we have only begun to assess. This course is a foray into the potential analyses of the Internet as an uncertain object of study.
LIT201S Intro to Global Cultural Studies^*
Taught by Professor Robyn Wiegman
TuTh 3:05 – 4:20PM
Friedl 216
No one doubts that we live in a globalized world, but how can we understand its complexity in cultural terms? Under the framework of everyday life, LIT 201 pursues an answer to this question by approaching culture from the perspective of the quotidian: as an analysis of the ways that people live, work, shop, create, struggle, and dream in the daily contexts that comprise their globalized worlds. By interpreting the daily life through its cultural expression in film, memoirs, literature, and art, this course revises familiar understandings of globalization by thinking about culture as both distinct from and complexly related to economics, politics, and social policy. No prerequisite required. Student assignments include short analytical writings, a midterm exam, and a final paper.
LIT243-01 Intro to Latinx Studies^
Taught by Professor Christina Leon
MW 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Crowell 108
This interdisciplinary course will provide a general introduction to the field of Latinx (e/a/o) Studies. We will consider literature, history, critical theory, political theory, performance studies, and cultural studies as we contemplate the terms: Latinx (e/a/o), Latinidad, Global South, and transnational. We will consider Latinx theory, movements, and art from the United States, as well as the broader hemisphere and globe. As we examine this interdisciplinary field, we will explore how Latinx Studies overlaps (and diverges) in crucial ways with other critical area, ethnic, and race studies: African and African American Studies, Critical Black Studies, Asian American Studies, Latin American Studies, and Caribbean Studies. Questions, rather than answers, will guide the seminar.
How do we bear witness to historical movements built of dreams and resistance—border crossings lived and the crossing of borders over lives? Where does the term Latinx come from? What stories, bodies, and worlds are built into its etymology that operates as a hope, a threat, and a long, variegated story? Whom does the term serve? Whom does it eclipse? How does latinidad encompass contradiction and reverberate differently across space and time? In thinking through these questions, we will we pay attention to the fraught fault lines of race, class, language, coloniality, and gender that put pressure on the word Latinx.
LIT290-02 What Was Heterosexuality?^
Co-taught by Professors Taylor Black and Ranjana Khanna
TuTh 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Allen 326
At the same time as it has become accepted to think of queer sexualities as socially constructed and always in flux, it can be easy to forget that heterosexuality is unstable and far from monolithic. “What Was Heterosexuality” surveys twentieth-century art, literature, theory, and popular media (film, television, advertising, music, etc.) to find out what it used to mean to be straight.
Co-taught by Taylor Black and Ranjana Khanna, the course will offer students a different, deeper, way of seeing, describing, and analyzing textual and discursive configurations of heterosexuality. Turning to queer theory, we will learn how to estrange heterosexuality, seeing it from the outside in. Critical texts from psychoanalysis and philosophy will help us see how notions of heterosexual desire, identification, and socialization are conceived from the inside out. Throughout, we will endeavor to defamiliarize ourselves with what we think it means to be straight, sharpening our skills as consumers and critics of literature, theory, and popular culture while on the lookout for representations of heterosexuality that are anything but average.
Students enrolled in the course can expect to complete two or three short writing assignments of less than five pages and a final creative project.
LIT314 Intro to Critical Theory^
Taught by Professor Nima Bassiri
TuTh 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 107
This course is an introduction to fundamental texts and concepts in the history of critical theory. We will be expanding the scope of our examination well beyond the remit of the Frankfurt School, to which the term ‘critical theory’ is often linked and look at key texts in the history of political philosophy, social theory, linguistics and language philosophy, gender studies, critical race theory, and postcolonialism. All our readings will be primary literature from what might be dubbed a ‘critical theory cannon’ and is intended to introduce students in the humanities and qualitative social sciences to essential and foundational materials. We will begin by examining core assumptions in the Western Enlightenment tradition, before examining critical reassessments from a number of theoretical standpoints including postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and critiques of secularism.
LIT316S Film Theory*
Subtitle: Analog/Digital
Taught by Blake Beaver
TuTh 1:25 – 2:40PM
Friedl 102
*This course fulfills a major requirement for the Film/Media Major track*
In “Film Theory: Cinematic Technologies,” we will engage in central debates around the transition from analog to digital film technologies, learning how to analyze the technological foundations of film and related media. The course is organized around two critical binaries in these studies: real/virtual and passive/interactive. In the first part of the course, we will focus on film and digital technologies’ different relationships to physical reality. In the second part of the course, we will shift our focus to film and digital technologies’ different affordances for viewer/user participation. Throughout the course, we will complicate simplistic assumptions about the differences between film and digital media by viewing films, playing online games, and reading essays from film and media theory.
LIT317S Media Theory*
Taught by Ernest Pujol Leon
WF 1:25 – 2:40PM
Crowell 107
*This course fulfills a major requirement for the Film/Media Major track*
Introduction to the material and technical infrastructure that informs and constrains the production and dissemination of knowledge. Exploration of cultural impact of technical media from writing to the internet. Combines historical and theoretical discussion with hands-on experimentation with various media, including the codex book, phonography and sound registration technology, photography, cinematography, video, virtual reality, digital computation, and the internet.
LIT320S Social Movements and Social Media^
Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh
TuTh 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 225
The seminar considers the uses and abuses of social media by social movements. Interested in a broader historical study of mediating technologies and the oppositional public sphere, seminar participants focus their research on the uses of cameras, phones, cassette players, the radio, and social media platforms, but also books, bodies, art, fashion, drones and other vehicles as oppositional technologies. The seminar considers the political and ethical uses of technologies in social unrests in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America as well as the West, with a view to understanding the evolution of global social justice mobilizations on the ground and online. It investigates the impact of technologies on social movements and social transformations in contemporary history. Student driven case studies will highlight engagements with social media by social movements past and present.
LIT345S Hitchcock: Master of Suspense^
Co-taught by Professor Rey Chow and Markos Hadjioannou
MW 10:05 – 11:20AM
Friedl 102
This course is designed for advanced undergraduates interested in cinema, film theory, critical theory, narrative and representation. The course offers a broad, accessible introduction to some of the topical issues debated by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, including practices of looking, crime and criminal behavior, troubled personalities, identity theft, romantic coupling, anonymous urban living, the middle-class family, and America during the Cold War period.
LIT350S Brains Everywhere^
Taught by Professor Antonio Viego
WF 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 225
Over the course of the last 3 decades, we have the witnessed the spectacularly speedy rise of the “neurosciences,” an historical event characterized by some critics as a “neuro-revolution” that has, in turn, given rise to “neuro-cultures” and “neuro-subjects.” We will track this history and ask ourselves what change in meaning might “neuro” effect in disciplines that were previously “neuro”-free? If there is a neuro-turn, what is it exactly that’s “turning”? We will read work by Catherine Malabou and Nicolas Rose, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, anthropologist Joseph Dumit, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, Disability Studies scholar, melanie yergeau, and neuro-psychoanalyst, Mark Solms.
LIT383S Breakdown: Madness, Self, Fiction^
Taught by Professor Cate Reilly
WF 1:25 – 2:40PM
Friedl 216
Study of madness, mental illness, and psychological distress as experienced and accounted for from literary and philosophical perspectives. How should an individual's declaration of spiritual health or illness by understood? What critical tools can literature bring to the study of the soul's suffering? Focus on testimonies of mental strife in a transnational/historical frame. Literary selections range from romanticism and realism to high modernism and contemporary neurofiction.
LIT390-03 Cultures of Fascism^
Co-taught by Professors Roberto Dainotto and Saskia Ziolkowski
MW 1:25 – 2:40PM
Languages 211
The use of the word “fascism” is on the rise, but what is meant by the term? The Fasci of Revolutionary Action were formed in January 1915, when Benito Mussolini declared that it was necessary for Italy to secure its national borders and engage in an aggressive foreign policy aimed at protecting national interests. In 1922, Mussolini was elected Prime Minister of Italy, and the following year the “fascist model” was adopted by Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party. By June 1940, when Marshal Philippe Pétain signed France's surrender to Nazi Germany, all continental Europe except the Soviet Union was under some fascist regime. This course will focus on the cultural reasons that determined the global spread of fascism and explore literary, theoretical, and historical representations of fascism, from Italian to American ones.
LIT390S-01 Darkness^
Taught by Professor Zakiyyah Jackson – NEW FACULTY!
WF 1:25 – 2:40PM
Friedl 102
This course investigates the concept and phenomenon of darkness in relation to, and in distinction from, blackness, shadow, obscurity, blindness, invisibility, and opacity as ideas and experiences. We will trace the development, and complex nature, of dualist, kaleidoscopic, and gradational representational frameworks pertaining to darkness in the history of transnational literary and filmic narrative form and contexts. Exploring the evolving role of color and form as elemental forces in global artistic, cultural imaginations will enable us to identify their dynamic inextricability with historical relational hierarchies in U.S. society pertaining to race, complexion, gender, class, ability, and national origin. Course thematics will include the interrelation of vision and dreamscapes, fantasy and illusion, chromaticity and blanching, transparency and opaqueness, absence and presence, and part and whole.
LIT460S Weil, Beauvoir, Murdoch^
Taught by Professor Toril Moi
MW 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 102
Simone Weil (1909-44), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86), and Iris Murdoch (1919-99) are towering figures in the history of European philosophy, yet they have all become somewhat marginal to the philosophical mainstream. All three wrote on ethics. Weil wrote on labor, society, force and affliction, and grace. Beauvoir wrote about the Other, in novels, memoirs, and The Second Sex, a groundbreaking feminist analysis of women’s situation. Inspired by Weil, Murdoch wrote about attention and the good, and went on to become one of the UKs leading novelists. The course will introduce students to their writing across genres, and situate their work in relation to their respective national traditions.
LIT618S Theories of the Visual^
Taught by Professor Markos Hadjioannou
T 3:05 – 5:35PM
Friedl 126
Examines the 'visual' as concept of major concern that traverses the debates of the modern and postmodern periods. Expands from the technological (painting, photography, cinema, television, and computation) to the theoretical and philosophical interpretation of visual culture. Examines major periods: from philosophical critique of visuality in 19th and early 20th c., to the height of cultural theory and criticism up until the 1970s; from the late 20th c. to the contemporary period that includes debates that expand our understanding of visual experience. Ends with introducing work that aims at decentralizing Western thought in the debate.
LIT650S History of Mental Illness^
Taught by Professor Nima Bassiri
W 3:05 – 5:35PM
Crowell 108
What is madness? Historical analysis offers a variety of answers to this question. This course will provide students with a broad introduction to the modern history of mental illness, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will cover a diverse set of issues, including the disciplinary formation of psychiatry and neurology, new medical understandings of pathology, and the political assumptions and ramifications of defining and redefining madness in the North Atlantic and abroad.
LIT681S Wittgensteinian Perspective on Literary Theory^
Taught by Professor Toril Moi
M 1:25 – 3:55PM
Friedl 102
An introduction to Wittgenstein’ Philosophical Investigations and its relevance for literary studies. Wittgenstein’s vision of language, and philosophy; the relationship between the inner and the outer (the soul and the body; pain and its expressions), and aspect-seeing (“seeing as”). Relevant texts by Austin, Cavell, Diamond, and Zwicky, and Moi. Literary theory by thinkers such as Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Fish, de Man. We will examine one novel, and one film (Blade Runner), to see how Wittgenstein’s philosophy enables us to respond to them. The course aims to give students interested in philosophy and literature a solid foundation for further work.
LIT690-7 Aesthetics From Kant to Barthes^
Taught by Professor Fred Jameson
TuTh 10:05 – 11:20AM
Friedl 107
This course will chart the course of aesthetic theory from its original 18th century formulations to the contemporary period. We begin with Kant on beauty and the sublime (third critique), Hegel on the history of art, and finally Schiller on art as a political intervention. In modern times we will examine Barthes and Deleuze on pioneering a kind of philosophical art criticism, associated loosely with structuralism; and then moving on to Adorno and Rancière as attempts to revive the framework of traditional aesthetics. Running across this chronology will be the theme of modernity and modernism, which may well demand attention to the emergence of the novel (Lukács) and that of modernist poetic language (Mallarmé).
(Undergraduates should consult Professor Jameson before enrolling.)
LIT690S-02 Marx’s Capital^
Taught by Professor Michael Hardt
M 3:05 – 5:35PM
Crowell 108
Our primary objective for the course will be to read systematically the 3 volumes of Marx’s Capital. We will seek to identify and understand Marx’s key concepts. Since there will be more than normal assigned reading, there will be less writing than in a normal graduate course.
LIT690S-03 Cultures After Orientalism^
Taught by Professor Rey Chow
MW 4:40 – 5:55PM
Friedl 102
This course is guided by a couple of large questions pertaining to postcolonial studies. First, how should we reappraise the historical, socioeconomic, and global implications of Edward Said’s influential, polemical argument about Orientalism, which has generated decades of critical debate and countless publications? Second, since Said’s work triggered wide-ranging interests in issues of cultural difference, cultural transmission, and multiculturalism (against a backdrop of late capitalism and postmodernism), how should we assess the continuing valence of this post-Orientalist cultural turn, so to speak, in contemporary critical discourse? In what ways does culture remain an interventional concept, or does it amid technoscientific and legalistic hegemonies? We will examine a range of discussions by notable authors (including Said, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, James Clifford, Etienne Balibar, Naoki Sakai, Prasenjit Duara, Rey Chow, Pheng Cheah, Anne Cheng, Naoko Shibusawa, Eva Illouz, and others), on topics such as imperialism and empire, nationhood, area studies, cultural authority and sovereignty, aesthetic representation, the rise of therapeutic discourse, and more.
LIT690S-04 Figure/Matter/Difference^
Taught by Professor Christina Leon
TH 3:20 – 5:50PM
Friedl 102
At a moment where many terms are under fire and revision, we will attend to theories that consider the often violent materiality of inscriptions capaciously understood. This seminar will read through various insights often relegated to the linguistic turn anew, paying attention to how questions of figuration, materiality, and articulations of difference that require us to contend with larger structural issues. In so doing, we will consider a few theoretical nodal points: deconstructive notions of the trace structure (or “writing”), rhetorical readings of metaphor, metonymy, and catachresis, and the racial, colonial, and sexual grammars that subtend so much of figured difference.
LIT690S-05 Aesthetics and Politics in the age of Generative AI^
Taught by Professor Luciana Parisi
M 10:20 – 12:50PM
Friedl 225
Through a close analysis of philosophical and critical theory texts stemming from the traditions of rationalism, empiricism, pragmatism and new materialism, the course will incite students to theorise the conditions of possibilities for an entangled theorization of aesthetics and politics today. In particular, the course looks at the transformation of AI into generative receptive AI systems (for instance the algorithms animating social media interactions) that are mediating and transforming sensible experience and the horizon of collective action. The course will focus on debates about what counts as perception within and against the representational order of the world and of the real. It will engage with scholarship that challenges the epistemological articulations of the human and of forms of phenomenological experience as sites of contestation against the racializing, gendering and sexuated models of the sensible. By engaging with anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal critiques of the sensible, this course invites students to reflect on the possibilities of undoing and/or re-doing the ground of aesthetics – the relation between percepts, affects and concepts. The course will particularly draw on the philosophical and critical articulations of black feminist aesthetics as a starting point to discuss possibilities of a fugitive AI interrupting the loop between percepts, affects and concepts.
LIT690S-6 Historicizing the Mother-Child Relation^
Taught by Professor Antonio Viego
T 3:05 – 5:35PM
Friedl 102
This seminar addresses the figure of the “mother” and the “mother-child” social tie as theorized in 20th century psychoanalytic literature primarily through the work of Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott. Klein’s work has famously focused on the importance of the mother’s breast and the child’s unconscious fantasies whereby the breast is both persecutory and nourishing. Lacan refers to the mother in one seminar as a “crocodile” whose jaws the child is never quite sure won’t just snap shut around it. Winnicott theorizes the notion of the “good enough mother.” This course will introduce students to the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott in addition to Jacques Lacan’s specific grappling with the mother figure. We will in tracking the figure of the “mother” also, of course, be tracking the figure of the “child.” Some of our questions include: What kind of social tie is the “mother-child” relation and how has it been theorized differently over the years? Overall, we will be interested in how the “mother function” has been articulated in the psychoanalytic period 1930-60 and how this articulation has inscribed itself in societies at large. What kinds of trouble does the “mother” stir, potentially, in a “child”’s psychic life and vice versa? Assignments include one long paper and one oral presentation on a text assigned for that week.
LIT890S-01 Toni Morrison and the Philosophy of Language^
Taught by Professor Maya Kronfeld
F 1:25 – 3:55PM
Friedl 126
This graduate seminar examines Toni Morrison’s fiction and critical essays in the context of major debates in the philosophy of language, but also draws on her verbal art to reconfigure the very terms of these theoretical discussions. Novels include Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, A Mercy, Tar Baby. We will also draw on archival materials from the Morrison papers at Princeton University.
Theorists of language that will be put into conversation with Morrison’s corpus include Douglass, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Baldwin, Glissant, Searle, Ngũgĩ, A. Davis, Gates, K. Taylor, Diagne. Special attention will be paid to the contributions of Black theorists to the study of key problems in the philosophy of language including signification and referentiality, proper names, metaphor, truth conditions, and indexicality.
LIT890S-02 Reading Difference^
Taught by Professor Cate Reilly
F 10:05AM – 12:35PM
Crowell 106
Introduction to the critical concept of “difference” in historical, cultural, political & disciplinary debates in modernity. We use Jacques Derrida’s Writing & Difference as an avenue onto broader intertextual & interdisciplinary questions. Students explore a fundamental text of deconstruction & follow the pathways of its contribution to contemporary theory, from philosophy & literary criticism to feminist theory & postcolonial criticism. Topics & authors include: ethics of Self/Other distinctions (Levinas); post/structuralism (Blanchot, Foucault); role of ethnocentrism in human sciences (Lévi-Strauss); psychoanalysis & writing (Artaud, Freud, Laplanche); phenomenology (Bataille Husserl, Kojève); gender (Cixous, Irigaray, Johnson); critical race theory (Bhabha, Spillers, Moten, Spivak).
LIT890S-03 Feminist Studies Now^
Co-Taught by Professors Robyn Wiegman and Jennifer Nash
TH 10:20 – 12:50PM
Friedl 216
What constitutes Feminist Studies as an interdisciplinary field fifty years after its academic inception? This course explores answers to this question by engaging recently published scholarly monographs and journal special issues in order to consider: (1) the theories, methods, and approaches that animate current feminist inquiries and the disciplines and interdisciplines addressed and critiqued; and (2) the defining characteristics of a “now” marked by the rapid decline of the higher education as a cultural ideal, the erosion of shared social infrastructures, global pandemics and ecocide, and endless war. Along the way we will read earlier texts that situate the now in a wider historical perspective and offer instruction on ways to grapple with the multiple challenges of the present. The course is oriented toward doctoral candidates in the humanities and social sciences.