Courses for Auditors
The Community Auditing Program offers two types of courses to auditors, University courses and Auditor Only Series courses. The University courses are the courses which Princeton students attend. They are part of the regularly scheduled classes at Princeton University. The Auditor Only Series courses are scheduled by the Office of Community and Regional Affairs. Princeton students do not attend Auditor Only classes.
Guidelines
- Registration is limited to the undergraduate courses in the catalog. We do not offer graduate level courses in this program.
- Community auditors may not participate in University courses. In these courses the student population must be the focus of the professor's attention before, during, and after class.
- In the Auditor Only Series courses, the community auditors are the students and may fully participate.
- Community auditors are not eligible to take Visual Arts, Performing Arts, or Writing courses.
- Very few courses are offered in the evening.
- Courses are not offered during the summer.
Course Catalog Link
To view and print the fall 2024 course catalog click on the document FAll 2024 CAP Lecture Offerings. Fall 2024 CAP Lecture Offerings
Auditor Only Series - Fall 2024
ASC103 The Major Women Novelists of American Modernism
Professor: Alfred Bendixen, Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies
Description: An exploration of four short novels by the major American women novelists of the early 20th century. Our analysis of theme and technique will engage both feminist issues and modernist techniques with an emphasis on the ways in which narrative experiments with structure and point of view transform conventional plots into powerful works of psychological complexity and social inquiry.
Our course explores four of the most popular and most critically acclaimed novels of the modernist period:
September 13, 2024: Edith Wharton, Summer (1917)
September 20, 2024: Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923)
September 27, 2024: Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)
October 4, 2024: Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
The four short novels we will be reading all achieved critical and commercial success, demonstrating the power and range of their authors as they dramatize the place of women in a rapidly changing world. Edith Wharton is best known for social satires revealing the tragic potential of upper-class urban life, but Summer shows her ability to write incisively about the darker side of American rural life. The Wharton revival that was launched with the appearance of RWB Lewis’s biography in 1975 rediscovered this book, recognizing it as the hot counterpart to Wharton’s colder Ethan Frome and as a bold exploration of sexuality and class prejudice. Its penetrating examination of New England village life in a changing world dominated by an aging and increasingly ineffectual patriarchy has made it a feminist classic. In A Lost Lady, Willa Cather offers an almost perfectly wrought novel dealing with the passing of the old west in the face of an encroaching and crude materialism, but it also relies on the author’s skillful and complex rendition of a male narrator who is unable to see beyond his own idealization of a beautiful woman. Fitzgerald acknowledged it as a major influence on The Great Gatsby. Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may be the funniest short novel in American literature, offering an amazing portrayal of a female picaresque heroine and her European travels. James Joyce supposedly saved his failing vision in order to read the installments of this comic masterpiece, which is unfortunately now remembered mostly for the film it inspired. Nella Larsen’s Passing is one of the masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance as well as one of the most compelling treatments of passing in our fiction. It is distinguished by a vivid portrayal of urban life, complex characterization, and a graceful but complex style that facilitates its delineation of both the social and psychological dimensions of race and racism.
Dates: Friday's – September 13, 20, 27 and October 4, 2024
Time: 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Location: on campus
About: Alfred Bendixen received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of North Carolina and taught at Barnard College, California State University, Los Angeles, and Texas A&M University before joining the Princeton faculty in 2014. Much of his scholarship has been devoted to the recovery of 19th-century texts, particularly by women writers, and to the exploration of neglected genres, including the ghost story, detective fiction, science fiction, and travel writing. His teaching interests include the entire range of American literature as well as courses in science fiction, graphic narrative, and gender studies. Professor Bendixen may be best known as the founder of the American Literature Association, the most important scholarly organization in his field, which he continues to serve as Executive Director and as a frequent director of its national conferences. His most recent books include A Companion to the American Novel, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), The Cambridge History of American Poetry (co-edited with Stephen Burt; Cambridge University Press, 2015), and The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture (co-edited with Olivia Carr Edenfield); Routledge, 2017). The Library of America volume of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems is his latest publication.
ASC104 Democracy in the Age of Trump
Professor: Stanley Katz, Professor
Description:
Dates: Thursday’s - October 10, 17, 24, 31 2024
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Location: on campus
About: Stanley N. Katz's recent research focuses upon recent developments in American philanthropy, the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime.
ASC105 In Focus: Claude Monet
Professor: Caroline Harris, Princeton Art Museum’s Diane W. and James E. Burke Associate Director for Education, and Department of Art and Archaeology
Description: Claude Monet’s canvases with their characteristic feathery brushstrokes and luminous colors are some of the most recognizable in the history of art. Given his popularity in the twentieth century, it is easy to forget just how innovative and experimental he was an artist. This course will examine his life and work in detail, covering his early lean years, his time in London during the Franco-Prussian War, his relationships with the other Impressionist painters, and his final years at Giverny. Special attention will be paid to works in regional collections, including the Princeton University Art Museum.
1. Young Artist in Paris
2. The War Years
3. Impressionists Unite
4. Monet is Rich
Date: Friday's, October 18, 25, November 1, 8, 2024
Time: 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Location: on campus
About: Caroline Harris has led the Education Department at the Princeton University Art Museum for over two decades. Her main research interest is nineteenth-century French painting, and her most recent publications are “Like a Fish Swimming into Uncharted Waters: An Interview with Zhang Hongtu” in Artists in Motion: Modern Masterpieces from the Pearlman Collection and “Alfred Sisley’s Portraits of Place” in Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection.