January 29, 2003: Reading List Feature
Inside
the course guide
A
look at what some Princeton students will be reading (and watching) during
the spring semester
Each semester, Princeton offers nearly a thousand courses for undergraduates, ranging across 67 disciplines, and each semester, delving into Princeton’s course guide is like diving into a delicious new bestseller: You can’t put it down. Each page enthralls, and each course calls out siren-like: Pick me. But, alas, only a select few can enroll, and those of us on the outside can be satisfied only by seeing some of what we’re missing. Here are excerpts:
The New Testament and Christian Origins
John G. Gager
This course will challenge your beliefs and assumptions about Christianity, no matter what they are. What is more, it will bring out beliefs and assumptions of which you were never even aware. Our goal will be to reconstruct a picture of the Jesus movement and of early Christianity from their beginnings using the scattered fragments of surviving data.
John Dominic Crossan, Jesus. A Revolutionary Biography
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
Bart Ehrman, The New Testament
The HarperCollins Study Bible
Creativity, Innovation, and Society
Steven J. Tepper
This course will explore the social context for innovation and creativity. Some of the questions that will be considered include: What explains creative breakthroughs in the arts, science, and the economy? What conditions – social, economic, cultural – foster an environment ripe for invention and experimentation? What is the relationship between new technologies and innovation? How does society recognize and reward its artists and innovators? What is the government’s role in supporting and regulating intellectual property and medical research?
John Ruskin, selection of critical writings about aesthetics
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects
Howard Gardner, Creating Minds
David Lamb, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress
Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
Evelyn Fox Keller, Feminism and Science
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class
Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Technology, and Urban Order
Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention
Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma
Ed Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
Shira White, New Ideas About New Ideas: Insights on Creativity from the World’s Leading Innovators
Civil Liberties
Robert P. George
This course inquires into the moral premises of controversial claims of civil rights and liberties. We shall consider real and hypothetical cases in which claims to rights and liberties come into conflict, or are alleged to come into conflict, with the rights and liberties of others, or with other important values. We shall consult philosophical writings as well as opinions of courts that have adjudicated disputed claims of civil rights and liberties as matters of constitutional and statutory law.
David O’Brien, Constitutional Law and Politics, Volume Two: Civil Rights and Liberties, and its supplement, Supreme Court Watch 2001
John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality
Problems in American Social History: The 20th Century
Nell I.
Painter
Whiteness studies, a new scholarly field, appeared in the 1990s. Building on insights from literature, history, art, and cultural and African-American studies, whiteness studies examines racial identity in people thought of as “white.” Although this seminar will concentrate on scholarly texts, it will spend some time with white nationalism and anti-racism, two activist dimensions of white identity.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race
Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror
Evolution of Jazz Styles
Anthony Branker
An introductory survey examining the historical development of jazz from its African origins through the present. The course will place emphasis on the acquisition of listening skills and explore related musical and social issues.
Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation
Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History
Jonny King, What Jazz Is
Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz
Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography
Ben Sidran, Talking Jazz: An Oral History
Lewis Porter and Michael Ullman, Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present
The East European Novel of the 20th Century
Caryl Emerson
The peoples of East Europe came late to political independence, and early to cultural awareness. Their literature tells unsentimental, sophisticated stories about how not to disappear. Crucial will be such questions as: Are “small peoples” destined to have their art “prefixed”? (e.g., Bach is a composer, Shakespeare is a writer, but Dvo¥rák is a “nationalist composer” and Andrzejewski a “Polish writer.”) At what point do literatures begin to belong to the world? Are national stereotypes reflected in these novels — or created by them?
Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Karel ¥Capek, War with the Newts
Karel ¥Capek, Hordubal
Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier: Schweik
Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains
Milan Kundera, The Joke
Ivo Andri, The Bridge on the Drina
The Cinema from World War II until the Present
P. Adams Sitney
We’ll study the history of sound, and often color, film since World War II. Emphasis on Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, the American Avant-Garde, and the accomplishments of such major filmmakers as Bergman, Hitchcock, Bresson, and Antonioni.
Films:
Maya Deren, At Land (1944)
Sidney Peterson, Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1949)
Roberto Rossellini, Paisà (1946)
Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (1950)
Jacques Tati, Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1951)
Carl Dreyer, Ordet (1955)
Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night (1958)
Robert Bresson, Pickpocket (1959)
Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958)
Stan Brakhage, Blue Moses (1962)
Michelangelo Antonioni, L’avventura (1960)
Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962)
Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966)
Jean-Marie Straub, The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (1968)
Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Bruce Baillie, All My Life (1966)
Michael Snow, Wavelength (1967)
Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets (1973)
Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Hollis Frampton, Hapax Legomena:
(nostalgia) (1971)
Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia (1983)
Readings:
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism
P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage
Parker Tyler, “Rashomon as Modern Art”
Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for the Conjuring of the Narrative”
Stan Brakhage, “Telluride Gold”
American Art and Modernism
John Wilmerding
A survey of major developments and movements in American painting and sculpture from the Centennial period to modern times, with collateral attention to photography and printmaking, architecture and landscape design. Attention is given to American art in the light of both national traditions and the evolution of modern art abroad.
Milton Brown et al., American Art
David Bjelajac, American Art: A
Cultural History
Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art
E. B. Feldman, Practical Art Criticism
Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood
John Wilmerding, American Views: Essays on American Art
Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women
Bram Dijkstra, Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams
William Ivins, How Prints Look
Barbara Ross, American Drawings in The Art Museum, Princeton
Wieland Schmied, Edward Hopper, Portraits of America
David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism
Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop
Sociobiology, Sex Roles, and Human Development
Elizabeth Fox
We will use principles of behavioral ecology to examine reproductive strategies and their effect on social systems. Examples will draw heavily from nonhuman primate research but will also include examples from other group-living mammals.
Karen Strier, Primate Behavioral Ecology
Sue V. Rosser, “Possible Implications of Feminist Theories for the Study of Evolution”
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science
W. C. McGrew, “Culture in Nonhuman Primates”
Stephen J. Gould, “Sociobiology: The Art of Storytelling”
Randy Thornhill, “Human Rape: An Evolutionary Analysis”
Barbara B. Smuts, “Male Aggression Against Women: An Evolutionary Perspective”
Sarah B. Hrdy, “Three Men and a Baby,” “The Optimal Number of Fathers,” “Who Cared?”
Jane Goodall, Chimpanzees: Bridging the Gap 
