Courses
Fall 2013
RSCP. 72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Profs. Carroll/Covington, [21586] Cross listed with C L 71000 & HIST 74000.
We will examine the possibilities and the limitations of disciplinary boundaries regarding the interpretation of sixteenth and seventeenth writing centuries. We will give special consideration to the rhetorical and narrative aspects of historical documents (such as the state papers, letters, and depositions) and the historical dimensions of literary works. Discussion will focus on texts written at moments of particular crisis in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when England and Ireland were undergoing episodes of extreme political upheaval and armed conflict Bthe Nine Years' War (AThe Blood of the English Crying Out of the Earth for Revenge, Spenser's A View, Shakespeare's Henry V, bardic poetry), the War of the Three Kingdoms (the 1641 Depositions, John Temple's Irish Rebellion, the pamphlet wars, Milton's prose works, Cromwell's letters, lyric poetry, and its aftermath, (William Petty's Political Arithmetic, Marvell's "Horatian Ode". Readings will also include historiographical, theoretical and critical texts by Nicholas Canny, Andrew Hadfield, John Pocock, James Shapiro, Nigel Smith, Hayden White.
ART. 85000 - Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts/Morgan Libary
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lane, [21718] Open to Ph.D. Art History students, permission required for all others.
This seminar will give students the rare opportunity to study original illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum. Introductory lectures will cover manuscript terminology and a review of illumination from its origins through the Gothic period, before focusing on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century books of hours produced in France and the Netherlands. Two classes on original manuscripts will be held at the Morgan, led by the curators of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. Students will work on Corsair, the Morgan’s online database, in which their Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are catalogued with full bibliographies and links to all of their miniatures. Seminar papers may concentrate on a single manuscript or a theme traced through many manuscripts, such as the iconography of an unusual cycle of miniatures or the relationship of a manuscript to panel paintings or to other French or Netherlandish manuscripts of the same period. After choosing a topic and reading the major sources on their working bibliographies, students will be given access to the Morgan’s Reading Room to consult material they cannot find elsewhere. Students are urged to visit the summer exhibition at the Morgan, Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art (May 10 through September 1), as an introduction to the course. Auditors will be accepted if space permits.
Preliminary Readings: De Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. London, 1994.
Wieck, Roger. Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. New York and Baltimore, 1988.
ART. 85010 - Sienese Quattrocento Art
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richter, [21719] Open to Ph.D. Art History students, permission required for all others.
To anyone visiting Siena today, the city still appears much as it did in 1348, the year of the first appearance of the bubonic plague. Scholars have discussed at length the art of the trecento claiming that successive generations venerated its rich traditions to the extent of ignoring more modern developments. This seminar attempts to prove otherwise. The sculptor Jacopo della Quercia had a far-ranging career that took him to Lucca, Florence, and Bologna. The pontificate of Pius II Piccolomini (1457-1464) brought a spurt of much-needed patronage to the city, initiating the construction of major Palazzi, fresco cycles, as well as vast sculptural projects. Donatello was so encouraged by a rejuvenated Siena that he decided to move there “for the remainder of his life,” although in the end he returned to his native Florence. We will be focusing on such cinquecento artists as Sassetta, Matteo di Giovanni, Vecchietta, Giovanni di Paolo, and Sano di Pietro. Major projects such as the decoration of the Pellegrinaio of the Ospedale della Scala and the Loggia di San Paolo will be given serious consideration. Perhaps the most significant artist to emerge from this mixture of the innovative plus the traditional is the polymath Francesco di Giorgio – engineer, theorist, painter, sculptor, architect—whose career took him to the enlightened court of Urbino and beyond. Far from being a city mired in its Late Gothic heritage, Siena turns out to be a substantial rival to Florentine hegemony in the Renaissance.
Preliminary Readings: Bruce Cole. Sienese Painting in the Age of the Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
CLAS. 75200 - Latin Sight Translation
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Clayman, [21515] Course open to Graduate Center students only.
C L. 80100 - The Faust Legend
GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Oppenheimer, [21688]
Few figures in Western literature have attracted as much continuous interest from as many important writers, artists, composers and film-makers as that of Doctor Faustus, the mysterious sixteenth-century physician and necromancer whose legendary pact with the devil granted him superhuman powers. Starting with the earliest published version of the story, the famous Faust Book dating from 1587 in Frankfurt (also available in translation), the course will explore strikingly different treatments of Faust's career by Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, and the conflicting views of humanity's relations to nature and the divine implied by their masterpieces. Also investigated will be the influence of the Faust story on writers as diverse as Byron, Carlyle, Dostoyevski, Pushkin, Hawthorne, Paul Valéry, and Lawrence Durrell. Films such as Mephisto, Hanusen, and Bedazzled, which approach the story and its motif of the devil pact in modern ways, will be considered and, where possible, shown; operatic and other musical treatments will be considered, along with the Faust legend's impact on painting.--One brief in-class presentation. One research paper.
C L. 80900 - Violence, Crime & Madness Between History & Literature in Early Modern Europe GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Calabritto, [21689]
How are violent crimes and odd, "mad" behaviors described and interpreted in early modern narratives in Italy, France and England? The course will include both historical and narrative texts--chronicles, historiography, private letters, tragedies, romance epic, novellas and romanzi --and will lay the foundations for the interpretation of the primary sources with an in-depth theoretical discussion of the notions of horror, voyeurism, empathy and value judgment
ENGL. 71600 - Early Modern Comedy & its Classical Models
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Pollard, [21556]
Comedy has been long condemned as a second-class literary genre, both aesthetically and morally inferior to tragedy, yet it has consistently annoyed its critics by proving strikingly popular with audiences. As early modern playwrights experimented with the genre's possibilities, they turned to the authority and cultural prestige of classical models in order to legitimate its status without sacrificing its marketable pleasures. In particular, they frequently imitated classical comedies' uses of tragedy to generate both parody and affective tensions. This course will explore playwrights' strategies for engaging audiences in both classical and early modern comedies, with an emphasis on uses of tragedy, satire, and parody, as well as topics including slaves, commerce, appetite, and pleasure. Readings will include Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, Frogs, and Plutus, Plautus's Menaechmi and Amphitryon, Terence's Eunuch, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, Jonson's Volpone and The Alchemist, Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One, and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Assignments will include two brief presentations, three short textual analyses, and a final research paper.
ENGL. 82100 - Discourses of Race & Colonization in Early Modern England GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Fisher,[21548]
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English explorers and colonists rapidly expanded the boundaries of their world, and started the process that would lead to the creation of the British Empire. This course will examine the formation of the racialized mind-set that was an integral part of this colonial project, including the constructions of whiteness that undergirded it. We will consider a wide variety of materials: literary texts, of course, but also travel narratives, books on physiognomy, scientific treatises on color, and royal proclamations. We will also be looking at material artifacts from the period such as maps, portraits, jewelry, and household items. The second major aim of this course is to familiarize students with the academic research that has been done on the topic of race and colonization in the early modern period over the last two decades. This is one of the most exciting and vibrant subfields of Renaissance Studies, and we'll be reading some of the most important scholarly work that has been done during this time in order to try and understand how the field has developed, and where it might be headed. Literary texts will include: Shakespeare's Othello and Sonnets, Jonson's Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty, Behn's Oroonoko, Fletcher's The Island Princess, Neville's Isle of Pines, and finally, an array of understudied early modern poems praising black beauty.
SPAN. 81000 - Perceiving Renaissance in 15C Spain
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Paolini, [21730]
This course, which will be taught in Spanish, will deal with a selected number of representative works written during the 15th century in Spain. It will include samples of the poetic production of Santillana, Mena and Manrique; treatises in defense of women by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón and Diego de Valera, a novela sentimental by Diego de San Pedro, and La Celestina. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the various schools of poetry, we will analyze their underlying theoretical assumptions regarding their origins, functions and intended audiences. Special emphasis will be given to textual problems and to the meaning of the terms used to designate these schools, as well as to the language, use of rhetoric and techniques of artes poetriae. Similarly, attention will be paid to the reception, institutionalization and disappearance of these early examples of literary manifestation. The second part of the course will be dedicated to the analysis of a few treatises in defense of women, as a response to widespread misogynistic attacks such as that from the Arcipreste de Talavera, and how this major conflict becomes a central issue in the novela sentimental and La Celestina. The entire course will focus on the intellectual background of the authors, their readings, their sources, their intended audience and their place within a specific literary tradition that seems to be both Castilian and European in scope. While the course will be conducted in Spanish, students who feel more comfortable speaking or writing in English may do so.
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SPRING 2013
RSCP. 83100 - Renaissance Art/Global Context
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Saslow, [20067] Cross listed with ART 75000.
This course examines European art of the early modern period (1300-1750) in its increasingly international context.
It begins with Europe’s long cultural interactions with its nearest neighbors, the Muslim and North African worlds; then, as Europe’s reach extended farther to Africa, China, India, and Japan, attention shifts to these new challenges to the received order of the West and their reciprocal influences.
After 1492, we trace the processes by which the Old World and the Americas were knitted together, at the cost of dramatic cultural upheaval in Europe, and considerable cultural loss or adaptation for native Americans and others.
Emphasis will be on processes of cultural transfer and exchange, artistic reception, hybridization, and conflict that led to the international character of the modern political and cultural world.
Requirements: Weekly readings and discussion. Brief oral critique of one reading. Research paper on a topic approved by instructor, or final exam.
Preliminary Reading: Jay Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (exh. cat., Washington, DC: National Gallery, 1992), esp. “A World United,” pp. 647-52.
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1982): chap. 2, “The World in 1400,” pp. 24-72; chap. 4, “Europe, Prelude to Expansion,” pp. 101-125.
RSCP 83100 - Early Modern Writing/Coloniztion/Globalization
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Carroll, [20609] Cross listed with C L. 85500
Why are we so obsessed with globalization today, and what do the origins of this system in the Renaissance have to do with the way we think of the world now?
To investigate how the world came to be understood as a global system, we will study maps, journals, essays, poetry, plays, and paintings from Spain, Mexico, India, China, France, Brazil, England, and the Dutch Republic from 1492 to 1675 alongside the work of some of the most important twenty-first century historians of early modern art, literature, and material culture.
You will get the chance to meet some of these scholars (including Serge Gruzinski, Alessandra Russo, Barbara Fuchs, Kim Hall, Stephanie Merrim, and Timothy Brook) at an international conference “Becoming Global: The Renaissance and the World” on March 15, 2013 at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Readings include: Montaigne, “Des cannibales,” Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, Haklyut’s Voyages, Jean de Léry, L’Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien, Travels and Encounters in the Early Modern World, and Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat.
C L. 80900 - Fretful Memory: The Past & Its Anxieties in Renaissance Prose
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [20335]
An exploration of self-definition through reference to an ideal past, thereby defined as classical; attention to the cultural and personal anxieties that stem from a shifting sense of kinship to, and difference from, a desired past and the fear of being anachronistically out of kilter with time.
We will begin with an introduction to memory studies, with special attention to the debate between history and memory, or the tension between memorial presence and historical distance. We will then move on to the struggles of five writers who define their work by their attempt to retrieve either a personal or cultural past.
Topics will include: the most ambitious memory project of the period, Petrarch’s retrieval of the classical past and the regrets that haunt him in this work (Familiar Letters); Castiglione and the irretrievable idealized past preserved in the memory of ritualized conversation (Book of the Courtier); Montaigne’s creation of a new genre, the essay, based on personal memorial reconstruction and self- reflection through print (Essays); Robert Burton’s frenetic imitation of Montaigne and neurotic memory slippage in the information overload of print culture (Anatomy of Melancholy); Thomas Browne’s surrender to the frustrated attempt to retrieve the past and his resignation about the futility of memory (Urn Burial).
C L. 88200 - The Returns of the Baroque: from the 1600s to the Present
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Fasoli, [20338]
After the Renaissance and its institutional yet contradictory revalidation of the classical past, the belief that modernity was an intrinsically positive value began to appear in western thought. “Baroque” has sometimes been intended as a strictly historical, chronological concept pertaining to 17th century Europe, at other times as a meta-historical, often derogatory, stylistic marker. In other instances, however, the idea of Baroque has proven to be a resourceful critical tool to undermine and redefine the traditional understanding of notions of authority, subversion, and mass culture. Reading the works of authors such as Tassoni, Marino, Pallavicino, Galileo, Tesauro, Gryphius, Saint Amant, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Gracián, Donne, Crashaw, and others, we will see how the theoretical reflection of the last 100 years has incessantly revisited the Baroque, and opened different interpretive paths on 17th century literature and arts.
We will also examine how, in recent decades, various writers and cultural critics have evoked the idea of Neo- or “returning” Baroques to characterize several contemporary artistic and literary expressions, often in non-European contexts. Crucial issues lie at the core of the debate on “returning” Baroques: the definition of modernity itself, and the dialectical relationship between Neo-Baroque and postmodernism.
We will discuss essays by authors such as Croce, Benjamin, D’Ors, Rousset, Maravall, Foucault, Genette, Deleuze, Fumaroli (on Baroque and /or on modernity) and Borges, Paz, Buci-Glucksmann, Sarduy, Manganelli, Calabrese, Lambert and Egginton (for Neo-Baroque and/or postmodernism).
ENGL. 81400 - Shakespeare, the Reformation Theatre and the Religious Turn
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. McCoy, [20133]
Over the last decade, literary studies have been marked by a striking turn to religion. To some extent, a postmodern hermeneutic of suspicion has been supplanted by what Julia Kristeva calls in her recent book, This Incredible Need to Believe (2009).
The course will consider broad academic and cultural factors behind this critical trend while examining more specific causes for New Historicism’s shift from power politics to religious beliefs and practices.
We will discuss revisionist histories of the Reformation demonstrating the vitality and durability of traditional Catholicism as well as the varieties of Protestant belief.
We will also consider speculation about Shakespeare’s own religious convictions as well as claims that his plays serve a propagandist or even sacramental function. And we will examine the religious atmospherics of a wide variety of his plays, discussing magic and enchantment in comedies (The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It), ceremonial in history plays (Richard II, Henry V), sacrifice in the tragedies (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, King Lear), and rebirth and resurrection in the romances (The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest).
ENGL. 82300 - Milton
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Walkden, [20140]
This course offers an examination of the work of John Milton. Our texts will include the youthful dramatic masque, Comus, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and a selection of Milton’s controversial prose on the topics of divorce and political liberty.
Necessarily, we will be looking at the generic and formal revolutions to which Milton subjected the traditions of English and epic poetry. Also inescapable will be the extraordinary phenomenon of Milton’s authorial production, a mode of self-representation that had a signal impact on eighteenth and nineteenth century British and American literature.
Grounding all of these literary inquiries will be our consideration of the shaping influence of the political and social upheavals that dominated the poet’s seventeenth century: civil war, regicide, the institution of republicanism, and the attending cultural revolutions in the religious and domestic spheres.
Our course will also consider some of the strategies by which later writers both deliberately and inadvertently have bent the concerns of Milton to suit a surprising, often non-Miltonic, range of political and social agendas. Our study of Paradise Lost, for example, will be accompanied by a look at that work’s continuing influence on political philosophical theories of sovereignty and resistance, contractual models of political and matrimonial obligation, and discourses of natural slavery.
Similarly, our reading of Milton’s final literary work, Samson Agonistes, will involve an investigation of the unique role that text has played in post-9/11 conversations about religious difference, toleration, terrorism, and post-secularity.
A further goal of this course will be an investigation of the varied landscape of Milton criticism within the last fifty years. Milton’s work has always invited a surprisingly contested array of literary critical discourses, and we will want over the course of the semester to test the conceptual constraints and advantages of competing modes of critical inquiry.
We will be looking, for example, at interpretations whose theoretical foundation lies in Marxism (Christopher Hill, Frederic Jameson), psychoanalysis and queer theory (William Kerrigan, John Guillory), feminism (Mary Nyquist), and reader response criticism (Stanley Fish).
Other critics who continue to exert a radical impact—William Empson, Joseph Wittreich—will be important for our critical evaluation of contemporary initiatives within Milton studies.
HIST. 71300 - Enlightenment & Religion
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sorkin, [20055] Cross listed with MALS 70600.
This course explores the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion. Our first session will be devoted to definitions of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.
We will then probe two related issues. First, how did the philosophes view religion? We will read such key thinkers as Locke, Pufendorf, Voltaire, Rousseau and Lessing on such critical issues as toleration, natural religion and the relationship between reason and revelation.
We will then shift to ask the less conventional question of the uses theologians or clergy made of the Enlightenment. In this connection we will read thinkers affiliated with movements of religious renewal such as the Anglican Moderate William Warburton, the Reform Catholic Lodovico Muratori and the maskil (Jewish Enlightener) Moses Mendelssohn.
The course will cross national borders (England, France, German states and Habsburg empire) and confessional boundaries (Protestanism, Catholicism, Judaism). Our focus will be Western and Central Europe.
P SC. 80301 - Counterrevolution from Burke to the Free Market
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Robin, [20411]
We live in a counterrevolutionary age. With the exception of the demand for LGBT rights – the one social movement of the last forty years that still retains some stamina – every struggle for greater freedom and equality has been brought to a standstill or has been put in reverse. Even Occupy Wall Street, which initially seemed so full of promise, has receded.
The scourges of the late nineteenth century – capitalism, empire, and war – remain the idols of the twenty-first. The left lacks traction, the right is in command. Despite the success of the right, its political thought remains unexplored.
This course seeks to remedy that through a close reading of the works of Edmund Burke, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Hayek. We examine their writings as counterrevolutionary texts, designed to resist and ultimately defeat modernity’s various movements of emancipation.
A major theme of the course will be how the right has come to embrace capitalism, despite some initial opposition to it, and how and why neoliberalism has come to be the most successful counterrevolutionary movement of the past century.
PORT. 88100 - Bodily Care/Antiquity-Port Ren
GC: M/T/W/R/F, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 1 credits, Prof. Ornellas e Castro, [20192] Open to HLBLL students only, EO permission required for all others.
SPAN. 82200 - Neostocism, Politics and the Shaping of Early Modern Minds
GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Schwartz, [20195] Open to HLBLL students only, EO permission required for all others.
Neo-Stoic philosophy constituted an important component of European thought in the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries. It contributed to the establishment of a secular ethics, which could be formulated either as an alternative to, or support for Christian moral teaching. This philosophical theory also influenced politics in Spain, and in Europe at large, as related to the constitution of absolutist monarchies.
The purpose of this seminar will be to examine a series of works by Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián and other writers of the Baroque that function in Neo-Stoic contexts, while reevaluating at the same time Epictetus’s and Seneca’s influence on their ideological position.
Erasmus’s and Justus Lipsius’s versions of Neo-Stoicism will be considered, as well as their role as mediators of the classics for the recreation of specific literary genres.
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FALL 2012
RSCP. 72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies: Renaissance Responses to Classical GenreTheory
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Profs; Pollard/Sogno, [18762] Cross listed with CLAS 82500, ENGL71600 & MALS 70500
This course explores Renaissance responses to Classical and Late Antique literary criticism, with an emphasis on their consequences for both theory and practice of literary genres. We will pay particular attention to discussions of tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, satire, and fiction, with attention both to theoretical treatises and to examples of these genres in both periods. Readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Heliodorus, Longinus, Horace, Cicero, Plautus, Cinthio, Guarini, Scaliger, Sidney, Jonson, and Shakespeare. All the texts for the course will be available in English translation, but PhD students in Classics will read classical and neo-Latin texts in the original languages, and others with the requisite languages are welcome to do so as well.
Requirements will include presentations and either a research paper or an English translation of, and commentary on, a relevant Latin text not available in translation.
RSCP. 83100 -Transatlantic Cultural Encounters
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [18763] Cross listed with ENGL 81100, C L, & ART 85000
This course will focus on scholarship that explores the consequences of contact between European and New World cultures in the Renaissance and Early Modern period, an age of exploration and expansion. It will concentrate on the transformations that occur when cultural forms originally associated with the Italian city state move across borders via national states and empires to the New World.
Readings will be drawn from political and social historians, art historians, and literary historians who deal with Italian English, French, and Spanish dimensions of this process.
We will begin by considering cartography as an intercultural discipline used for the mapping of Europe=s own internally dynamic geographical space and its relation to geographies beyond its borders in some major cartographic projects of the period.
We will then consider political and intellectual theorization of contact with non-Europeans, as well as reciprocal effects of encounters between European and non-European cultures, including mixed identities and mixed literary and visual representation expressing resistance, absorption, and synthesis.
Themes will include culture as forms in geographic motion, as well as issues of authenticity, imitation, appropriation, and mimicry. Examples will be drawn from the historical, literary and visual traditions, including case histories and the theory of the state and empire; lyric, epic, travel narrative, and ethnographic description; painting, prints, drawing, architecture, and cartography. Particular attention will be devoted to the relation of the formal qualities of works to their geographical setting, especially where competing geographies and identity groups intersect.
Because this is an interdisciplinary course, students are encouraged to bring material to the course from their home discipline.
RSCP 83100 B Theatre & Theatreatricality in the Renaissance
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Saslow, [19469] Cross listed with THEA 85600 & ART. 75000
"All the world's a stage" wrote Shakespeare, and all the arts of the early modern era were profoundly imbued with metaphors, images, and techniques of the theatre.
This lecture course will examine the interrelations between the performing and visual arts from ca. 1300-1750, when dramatic performance and the buildings to house it developed the forms we know today. In tandem with literature and architecture, painting, sculpture, and graphic art explored theatricality through naturalistic narratives that aimed to involve the viewer as if they were dramas, with the picture frame assuming the same role as the proscenium.
From sacred drama performed in or around churches like Giotto's Arena Chapel, through the court masques and operas of the Baroque, to the emerging commercial popular theatre of Hogarth's London, this course ranges in scope from literal to metaphorical: from theatre "proper" (spaces dedicated to performance) to the ephemeral art of festival and pageant, to architecture and decoration that aimed to theatricalize other activities, and to theatricality as subject matter and metaphor in the visual arts.
In addition to providing a chronological overview, the course will emphasize several broad interdisciplinary themes: secularization, patronage, political uses of theatrical self-display, and theatre as material culture (the intersection of art and technology). While designed to meet the needs of students in Theatre, Art History, and Renaissance Studies, the course will also cut across these fields: for however academia may categorize them today, in Renaissance culture the art of theatre and the theatricality of art were inextricable.
The course will include a final examination as well as a final research project.
ART. 75010- Medicis: Patrons & Collectors
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richter, [18984] Course open to Art History students only. Department permission required for all others.
Florence in the Renaissance was often referred to as the "new Athens," having achieved a cultural zenith rivaling that of Periclean Greece or Imperial Rome. The Medici family dominated the city's cultural and political growth during this entire extended period. From 1434 until 1492, they exerted power without holding any major office functioning as de facto rulers in a republic that was jealous of its liberty.
The family survived temporary exile after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent only to return stronger than ever as hereditary dukes in the 16th century, their power supplemented by their control over the papacy as well. The Medici exercised authority both overtly and covertly through the manipulation and influence of their patronage. Patronage helped to build the most magnificent dynasty in Italian history whose artistic legacy formed the nucleus of the collections of both the Uffizi and Pitti Palace Museums.
This course will cover the history of the family from its obscure origins in Mugello in the 13th century to the end of the 16th century when a series of strategic arranged marriages placed the Medici at the very center of European power.
The Medici not only attracted the most significant artists of the period (Donatello, Botticelli, and Michelangelo), but the greatest politicians (Machiavelli), thinkers (Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola), writers (Guicciardini and Vasari) and religious zealots (Savonarola). This course will focus on the intermeshing of family and civic goals that helped transform Florence into the epicenter of the Renaissance. Apart from focusing on the contributions of the individual members, lectures will also cover such topics as the Medici collection of antiquities and decorative arts, the burgeoning interest in Northern European painting, the creation of public residences and private villas, as well as the grand decorative schemes of their great palazzi. The rise of the Medici dynasty resulted in nothing less than the transformation of Florence from a medieval town to become the focus of international cultural and social life in Europe.
Requirements: There will be a final exam and students will be required to write an extensive research paper.
Suggested Preliminary Readings:Ames-Lewis, F., ed. The Early Medici and their Artists, London: Birkbeck College,1995Goldbert, E.L. Patterns in Late Medici Patronage, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983Hibbert, H. The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, New York: Perrenial, 1974
ART 85000- 15th-18th Century European Textiles at the Metropolitan Museum
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wunder, with Melinda Watt, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art.[18991] Course open to Art History students only. Department permission required for all others. All classes meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This object-based seminar will explore European textiles from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Ratti Textile Center. Textiles were a treasured art and a form of currency in early modern Europe, where they were used in secular fashions, ecclesiastical vestments, household furnishing, and public decorations to communicate wealth, status, taste, and nationality. Recognizing and understanding the appearance, vocabulary, and meaning of textiles is crucial for scholars in diverse fields of study in order to interpret early modern European texts and images that assumed a shared knowledge and connoisseurship of them. This course will combine the technical study of textiles with a theoretical and historiographical grounding in recent scholarship in the fields of fashion, consumption, and patronage. Classes will meet at the Ratti Textile Center, where we will use state-of-the-art analytical equipment to examine objects from the Metropolitan Museum's rich collection of European textiles, including woven silks and velvets, laces, tapestries, carpets, and embroideries. We will also explore representations of textiles in other media in the museum galleries and will meet with curators and conservators from various museum departments. Students will be introduced to the museum database system and will have access to Watson Library and the Ratti Textile Center to pursue their research projects. Graduate students from diverse programs of study are very welcome to enroll. This course is being supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
For more information, contact Prof. Amanda Wunder (ajwunder@gmail.com). All classes will be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Requirements: Weekly readings and participation in object viewings and discussions. One catalogue entry due mid-semester. Object-based final research paper and oral presentation at the end of the semester. Auditors by permission of instructors.
Required Preliminary Reading:ATextiles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,@ Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 53, no. 3 (Winter 1995-96): Foreword and Introduction, pp. 5-18; European Textiles catalogue entries, pp. 45-58.Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, AEast & West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern History,@ Journal of Social History vol. 41, no. 4(Summer 2008): pp. 887-916.
C L. 78100- Figurations/Baroque Imaginary
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Schwartz, [18852]
This course will reconsider some aspects of the rhetoric and ideologies of the Baroque as an historical period in European literature, which extended roughly from 1560 to 1680.
It will focus on a series of literary works that shared a common background of motifs, topoi and images, which will be interpreted in relation to specific historical and philosophical contexts, among them, labyrinths, masks, metamorphoses, dreams, mirrors and visions.
These in turn will be compared with figurations in pictorial and emblematic texts by Alciati and Vaenius. The particular aesthetics of wit, and the function of the conceit in Baroque écritures will be also examined in its linguistic and ideological implications. Readings will include important works of Picaresque fiction, The Swindler by Quevedo and Courasche by von Grimmelshausen; Menippean satire, Quevedo's Visions or Dreams; Góngora's narrative poem Solitudes; plays by Calderón de la Barca; Gracián's novel The Critic (El Criticón and selected poems by Tasso and Marino, Tristan, Saint-Amant and d'Aubigné; Quevedo and Góngora; Donne, Gryphius and Silesius, as well as.
A basic bibliography of some theoretical anad critical works on the Baroque in art and literature will be distributed in class.
ENGL. 82100- After New Historicism: Recent Approaches to the Study of Early Modern English Literature and Culture
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Fisher, [18772]
This course will provide students with a survey of seventeenth-century poetry, including the work of authors like John Donne, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Aemilia Lanyer and Katherine Phillips, while also providing an introduction to some of the new methodologies in early modern studies.
Whereas many methods classes end with New Historicism, this class will begin with it, considering how recent scholarship builds on this earlier research and attempts to move beyond it. Much of the secondary work that we will be studying could ultimately be labeled "early modern cultural studies."
We will begin by reading some of the most influential examples of new historicist literary criticism B including works by Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose B in an effort to understand the particular intervention that these writers were making.
We will then move on to study some of the new critical concerns that have emerged in the wake of new historicism: these will include research on the history of the book and the history of science, as well as things like animal studies, food studies, environmental studies, and work on globalization and early modern material culture. In each case, we will read important articles from these new subfields alongside appropriate primary materials. So, for instance, we=ll read Randy McCleod and Roger Chartier's work on the history of the book in relation to the religious poetry in George Herbert's The Temple (1633). Likewise, we'll explore the ecocritical take on pastoral poetry offered by critics like Simon Estok and Gabriel Egan.
The requirements for the course are two short assignments and a seminar paper at the end of the semester (15-pages).
FREN. 72000 - Rabelais & French Humanism
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Renner, [19045] Course taught in French.
Ce cours offre la possibilité d’étudier de manière approfondie les œuvres d’un des auteurs les plus importants du patrimoine littéraire mondial, François Rabelais. Les quatre livres authentiques des Chronicques pantagruelines de ce moine/médecin/humaniste constituent un tour de force linguistique, littéraire et culturel. Ils nous permettent donc un accès privilégié et fascinant à la France historique et humaniste au seuil des temps modernes ainsi qu’à une littérature « en devenir » dont les concepts et stratégies témoignent de ce flou créatif qui rend le seizième siècle si essentiel pour le développement ultérieur de ces domaines (politique, social, intellectuel etc.). Une bonne compréhension des siècles suivants ne saurait être concevable sans l’étude de ce qu’on appelle d’habitude la « Renaissance ». C’est aussi pour ces raisons que ce cours s’adresse à tous les étudiants de la langue, littérature et civilisation françaises et non pas seulement à ceux qui étudient la Renaissance.
Nous allons nous pencher sur une multitude d’aspects qui sortent de ces textes, tels que la question du genre, le jeu entre sens littéral et figuré ou bien le rôle du comique sous toutes ses facettes pour n’en mentionner que trois exemples. La binarité exemplaire du texte (populaire/sérieux, grossier/savant, prosaïque/ poétique etc.) qui sort de ces analyses semble au cœur de l’intentionnalité d’une œuvre complexe et subtile, œuvre dont la modernité ne cesse de surprendre et ensuite d’enthousiasmer ses lecteurs.
Pour des raisons pratiques, les étudiants sont priés de se procurer les éditions bilingues (version originale et français moderne) indiquées ci-dessous.
Liste des textes requis de François Rabelais:
Pantagruel, éd. G. Demerson (Paris: Seuil, 1996) ISBN 2-02-030033-8.
Gargantua, éd. G. Demerson (Paris: Seuil, 1996) ISBN 2-02-030032-X.
Le Tiers Livre, éd. G. Demerson (Paris: Seuil, 1997) ISBN 2-02-030176-8.
Le Quart Livre, éd. G. Demerson (Paris: Seuil, 1997) ISBN 2-02-030903-3.
FREN. 83000 - 17th Century French Literature: (Un)Classical Bodies
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Stanton, [19047] Course taught in English
This course will examine diverse and dissimilar constructions of the body in seventeenth-century France
We will begin by examining recent theories of the early-modern body in Bakhtin, Elias, Lacqueur, and Bordo, but most notably (and influentially) in Foucault and his notion of “the classical” and disciplined body. These readings will inform our discussion of different – and potentially contradictory – discourses imbricated in the production of early-modern gendered bodies over and beyond the Cartesian body: the medical (anatomical), sexual (sodomitical and tribadic), reproductive, perverse and grotesque body; the social, civilized, courtly (honnete) body; the cross-dressed body; the rhetoric of the face and the portrait; the king’s bodies; and the religious and mystical (ecstatic) body. Authors to be read include: Bourgeois, Chorier, De Grenailles, Descartes, Duval, Faret, Foigny, Guyon, Héroard, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Molière, Montpensier, Paré, Pascal, Poulain de la Barre, Saint-Simon and Venette. If we can arrange it, we will also visit the collections of anatomical drawings at the New York Academy of Medicine. Class discussions will be conducted in English; readings will be in French (although some, eg Descartes, Poulain, La Fontaine can also be found in translations)
Work for the course will include a 20-page paper and an oral presentation of one of the primary readings.
A prior knowledge of seventeenth-century French literature and culture is recommended, but not required.
For any questions about the course, please contact Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com).
HIST. 71100- Science, Medicine & Faith in Early Modern Europe GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kavey, [18737]
This seminar interrogates the complicated intersections determining ideas about humans, the natural world, and God between the late medieval period and the late 17th century. Through a combination of primary and secondary sources, we will analyze the ways in which institutions of faith influenced the kinds of questions that natural philosophers asked during this period, determine whether there was a meaningful trajectory in those questions over time, and consider whether and how the findings of various natural philosophers changed ideas held by these institutions.
We will also interrogate the centrality of faith in medicine, natural philosophy, and early modern culture. Finally, we will consider the place of medicine and magic as intermediaries between humans and divine intention, paying particular attention to the various religious responses mounted for and against these two practices.
HIST. 79000- European Jewry 1550-1750
GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Pro, Sorkin, (18738] Cross listed with MALS 76100
PHIL. 76300- Descartes & Contemporary Issues GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. GSUC8203, 4 credits, Prof. Rosenthal, (18901]
We'll go carefully through Descartes's Meditations, supplemented by selections from the Objections and
Replies, Descartes's letters, very occasional selections from others of his writings, and some contemporary commentary. The Meditations will be our primary focus.
We'll have two main concerns, pursued concurrently. One will be to develop an accurate understanding of Descartes's views and arguments and evaluate their merits. The other will be to examine connections those views have with some cognate or related debates in the contemporary literature, and see whether either helps us understand or evaluate the other.
Among topics of special focus will be the role of the doubting Descartes enjoins (as against wonder or aporia) and whether that doubting is relevant to epistemological skepticism; his appeal to an analytic over a synthetic method, and whether that amounts to a naturalizing of epistemology; his view of God's arbitrary creation of the eternal truths, and its connection to the Meditation I doubting and to the innateness of some ideas; the status of the cogito (in Meditation 2, not the Discourse)Cif it's an argument what its structure is, and if not how to understand it; whether the cogito supports epistemological foundationalism; what it is on Descartes's view for an idea to be innate; his view that physical reality is solely extension, and how we can know about it; how his views about extension differ from Galileo's dictum that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, and how each of those views challenges Aristotle's; Descartes's view of such nongeometrical physical properties as color, sound, and others apparently accessible by only one sense modality; his view about the nature of sensing and how it relates to thinking; the apparent circularity of his proof of God's existence; Descartes's view about how the powers of will and understanding function, and of error as due to the will's outstripping the understanding; his view about the status of mathematical and other necessary truths; his view about God's creation of everything (else); and Descartes's views about mind-body materialism and about the relation of mind to body.
Among cognate and related contemporary issues that we'll consider are Moore's paradox (in connection with the cogito); the status of mathematical, necessary, and analytic truths (in connection with the eternal truths); nativism; whether Descartes's views about the faculties of will and understanding square with current views about intentionalityCe.g., but not solely, whether one can will what to think, doubt, wonder, and so forth (voluntarism); perceiving physical color or sound as against extension; intentionalism about mental qualities; mind-body materialism; and methodology in philosophical work and in other truth-seeking fields.
We'll also keep in mind several background questions: Is Descartes less concerned with the epistemological questions that figure centrally in much Descartes exegesis than with metaphysical and psychological issuesCand if so why is such epistemological exegesis so persistent? Are Descartes's metaphysical views pretty minimalist by today's standards? And are his psychological views more challenging and useful than often appreciated?
We'll rely on Cottingham et al (3 vols.) for texts of all Descartes's work, letters included; it will be good to get vol. 2. The other two, secondary literature, and other contemporary work will be on library reserve, with selections and articles sometimes available in pdfs.
SPAN. 72300- Don Quijote
GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lerner, [18808] Course open to students in the HLBLL program. Permission of Executive Officer required for all others.
This course will focus on the transmission of the text of Cervantes Don Quijote in the seventeenth century and in the twentieth century. The question of the relationship between the first and the second parts of the novel will be also examined, as well as the most important semantic and ideological aspects of the text.
To study problems of annotation, several modern editions will be analyzed, among them, the best known ones of M. de Riquer, J.J. Allen, L. Murillo, J.B. Avalle-Arce, V. Gaos, F. Sevilla-A. Rey Hazas and Francisco Rico. Critical interpretations of the Quijote will be also considered so as to recast the history of its reception in the twentieth century.
SPAN. 87100 - Rereading "Cronicas de Indias"
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Chang-Rodriguez, [18816] Course. open to students in the HLBLL program. Permission of Executive Offier required for all others.
The course will study a diverse group of testimonies related to the early contact period. Generally grouped under the label "crónicas de Indias," they will include letters, histories, "relaciones" and chronicles written by authors of diverse backgrounds and ethnicity. These works will be situated in a historical grid in order to analyze, from various perspectives, the objectives of their authors and understand their meaning in the shared culture and history of Europe and the Americas.
The discussions will include:
1) the concept of history and the impact of the New World;
2) why these texts became "literature;"
3) the polemics about the indigenous population;
4) the shifting positions of the writing subject;
5) the role of the eye-witness;
6) the indigenous perception of the encounter;
7) gender issues.
There will be time to present and pursue individual projects. Class discussions will be illustrated with visual materials and communication facilitated through Blackboard.
Readings will include a variety of texts by: Las Casas, Cortés, Inca Garcilaso, Guaman Poma de Ayala, Catalina de Erauso. If the student has read some of the selected texts in campus, alternate texts will be supplied in order to expand his/her familiarity with the area.
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