COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Fall 2001
RSCP. 72100 - Renaissance Geographies GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Martin Elsky, [60051] Cross listed with Engl 70200 & MALS 70500
This course is an introduction to the various ways Renaissance and Early Modern culture has been mapped in geographic space--from the local, the national, and the imperial, with special emphasis on the trans-Atlantic. Our starting point will be the current debates over the kinds of borders in which culture is both produced and received. We begin with the claims for the authenticity of local communities and the counter-claims for large cross-cultural geographic space. Using recent work in humanist and post-humanist geography as a framework, we will examine how scholarship in several disciplines defines the places in which identity is formed and agency is enacted in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. Readings will be drawn from cultural and political history, literature, chorography, cartography, and landscape painting. The themes of the course will include the processes by which cultural borders are imagined, projected, and crossed. Attention will also be paid to the assumptions made by critics and historians concerning the "natural" locations of Renaissance and Early Modern culture. Because this is an interdisciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home disciplines.
ART. 71500 - Age of Giotto:Italy 1250-1400 GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Mallory, [60152]
This course will examine the art of Florence, Padua, Siena, Rome and Assisi from c. 1250 until c. 1400. Called Late Gothic or Proto Renaissance by art historians, this period is witness to a transformation in religious and secular art that paves the way for the great masters of the Italian Renaissance. Major painters and sculptors to be studied include Nicola, Giovanni, and Andrea Pisano, Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, Simone Martini, and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Topics to be discussed include: the evolution of the altarpiece, the development of large-scale fresco decoration, Giotto and Duccio and the growth of visual narratives, the role of secular art, and the effects of the "Black Death" on the art of its time. Auditors permitted.
ART. 72100 - Rembrandt & His School GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Leonard Slatkes, [60154]
This lecture course will deal with all aspects of Rembrandt's art and life. Special emphasis will be put on his complex artistic development in various media: painting, drawing and the graphic arts. The nature and role of patronage in Rembrandt's career will be analyzed. Attention will also be paid to the many problems of subject matter and meaning in his work. Rembrandt as an innovative portrait painter will be investigated. The ways in which Rembrandt functioned as a teacher, how he used his students, and the nature of the "Rembrandt Academy" will also be discussed. Among the other topics to which special attention will be paid are, Rembrandt as a history painter, Rembrandt's religious subject matter, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Rembrandt as the creator of historicized portraits, and Rembrandt as an experimental graphic artist. A research paper will be required. Auditors permitted.
ART. 81500 - The City of Florence GC: M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. 3416, 0-12 credits, Prof. James Saslow, [60162]
Since its founding by the Romans, Florence has played a major role in world art through several successive stages: the "cradle of the Renaissance," the home of the first museum, a magnet for scholars and connoisseurs on the Grand Tour, a Romantic-Victorian expatriate mecca, the first capital of united italy, and an aging tourist attraction. This seminar will examine the city and its traditions as a case study in the development of Renaissance and Baroque art and its subsequent changes in meaning, presentation, and physical form as it evolved from a living tradition to a historical legacy. Course requirements: weekly readings and discussion, including one in-class oral critique, and a slide presentation. Report topics may range from the 14th to the 20th centuries, and may deal directly with Renaissance works and artists in their own context, or with issues of patronage, collecting, conservation, museology, or historiography as they developed in Florence or impinged on its art in later times.
C L. 72000 - The Baroque in Art & Literature GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oppenheimer, [60196]
What is the Baroque? Has the term any clear meaning? Is it useful, even if confusing and paradoxical, as designation of a profound and major movement in the arts, literature, politics, science and warfare during the late sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth centuries? Do there exist important and little recognized links between Baroque aesthetics and influential modern ideas of aesthetics, even in physics? The course will consider these and related questions in terms of the thought and work of Caravaggio, Rubens, Bruegel, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Cervantes, Sydney, the German poet Andreas Gryphius, Descartes, Milton and, laterly, Rembrandt and Einstein. Readings will include: Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale;Paul Oppenheimer, Rubens, a Portrait: Beauty and the Angelic; Cervantes, Exemplary Stories; Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques; Roy Strong, Art and Power; Sydney, Arcadia; Poems by Donne, et al (as listed above; some in translation); The Essential Descartes. Margaret D. Wilson ed. Selected readings from and on modern poets, artists and scientists
ENGL.71600 Shakespeare & Contemporaries GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Di Gangi, [60637]
Long considered the preeminent dramatist of early modern England, Shakespeare was in his own time one among many talented and admired playwrights working within a vibrant professional theater industry. This course provides an opportunity to read Shakespeare's plays alongside those of his lesser-known contemporaries. We will explore how these dramatists addressed various social, economic, and political issues; how they worked within and beyond the generic conventions of comedy, tragedy, and history; and how they contributed (as rivals, imitators, and collaborators) to the growth of the professional theater and to the cultural life of early modern London. We will focus on less frequently read plays of Shakespear; therefore, some familiarity with his more popular works--The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth--while not necessary, will be useful. Shakespeare plays will include 2 Henry VI, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Anthony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline. Plays by other dramatists will include Marlowe, Edward II; Arden of Faversham; Heywood, Edward IV; Dekker, The Shoremaker's Holiday; Fletcher, Philaster; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi. Requirements include either two shorter papers or one long (20-25 pp.) Paper; three brief reponse papers; and one class presentation.
ENGL. 81500 - Milton's Epics & Romantic Prophecy GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Joseph Wittreich, [60653]
We will read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, along side such Romantic revisionary efforts as Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as part of our own attempt to give definition to what Christopher Caudwell calls "Miltonic Romanticism" and to review (and revise?) the extent to which Milton anticipates the ideology that Jerome McGann thinks the major works of Romanticism instantiate. Over the semester, we will trace the progressing understanding of Romantic prophecy from the classic study by M. H. Abrams in the 1960s to the recently published studies involving both poetry and painting by Morton D. Paley.Requirements: an oral presentation or two, plus a final paper of at least 20 pages.
FREN. 87400 - Seminar in Early Modern Studies GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, [60077]
Information: Ph.D. Program in French 212/817-8365
MUS. 76202 - Music History: Renaissance GC: M, 4:00-6:00 p.m., Rm. 3491, 3 credits, Prof. Dennis Slavin, [60092]
This course will survey some central issues occupying scholars of Renaissance music (including the use of the term "Renaissance"). We will begin by learning the notation of Renaissance polyphony, which will give rise to questions about our historical relationship with music of five centuries ago. Thereafter we will examine three central repertories of music (the French courtly song of the late 15thcentury; music written for the Catholic church in the late 15th and ealry 16th centuries; and the 16th-century Italian madrigal), considering how the music was performed and preserved; who listened to it and supported it; how it was constructed; ant the itellectual preoccupations and social position of its composers and performers.
MUS 81202 - Performance Workshop Reniassance GC M, 7:30-9:30pm, Rm. 3491, 2 credits, Prof. Stone [60103]
(Note: This course is recommended for RSCP students in Music 76002 and open to anyone who wishes to take it independently or participate without registering) Works studied in Music 76002 will be performed, from photocopies of 15th- and 16th-century sources, and performance issues will be explored through experimentation. Notational principles will be explained; prior knowledge of Renaissance notation is not required.
SPAN. 72300 - Don Quijote GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Isaías Lerner, [60144]
Information: Ph.D. Program in Hispanic & Luzo-Brazilian Literatures: 212/817-8410
SPAN. 82200 - Seminar: Spanish Literature of the Baroque GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Lía Schwartz, [60148]
Information: Ph.D. Program in Hispanic & Luzo-Brazilian Literatures: 212/817-8410