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.
