ART. 81500 - Baroque Rome GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. James Saslow, [47519]

Rome by 1600 was the headquarters of a Catholic Church at the zenith of its religious influence and artistic prestige; for the first time since antiquity, the Eternal City was again the epicenter of an international cultural network, now fully global.

This seminar will examine major monuments produced in Rome, or under Roman influence, across Europe and, increasingly, Asia and the Americas.

Lectures and readings will emphasize themes of 17th-century patronage, cross-cultural interchange, relation with the city’s past, and connections between characteristic Baroque aesthetic forms and prevailing spiritual or scientific ideals and socio-economic structures.

Media include painting and sculpture (Roman artists like Bernini and Artemisia Gentileschi at home and abroad, long-term foreign residents like Poussin, and visitors like Velazquez and Rubens); architecture and urbanism (expansion of the city: Borromini, women patrons); and theater (both as a visual art and a pervasive Baroque metaphor).

Requirements: First 8 weeks: weekly reading, including a short oral report on one of the assignments. Last 6 weeks: illustrated class presentation on a topic to be determined with the instructor, 30-40 minutes.


ENGL. 71600 - Shakespeare Early Modern Theatre and Contemporary Performance GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Richard McCoy [47180]

The course will cover a broad range of Shakespearean plays, including comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, histories such as Richard II and Henry V, at least one late romance, The Winter’s Tale, and several major tragedies including Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus.

We will focus on different aspects of early modern stage history – the transition from religious drama and ceremonial pageantry to popular entertainment, connections between patronage and commercial enterprise, the publication and marketing of "plays" as "works," and the tension between elite and popular traditions.

We will also probe material, historical and esthetic reasons for Shakespeare’s enduring preeminence in contemporary culture, aiming to move beyond both reflexive bardolatry and deconstructive skepticism.

A short class presentation, 2 or 3 brief response papers, and a 20 page research paper will be required.

ENGL. 82300 - Milton and the Reinvention of Gender, Psyche, and Society GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Jacqueline Di Salvo, [47193] {Cross listed with WSCP 81000}

In Paradise Lost, Milton depicts numerous beginnings, of angels, devils, hell, paradise, both the universe and humanity, language, poetry, marriage, sex, sin, psychic disorder, politics, tyranny, etc.

Milton wrote in revolutionary times and was himself one of the only active revolutionaries who were also great English poets.

We will read Paradise Lost , as well as Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, within the context of both the English revolution and the cultural revolution of the Early Modern era.

Within this context, the imagined beginnings of the epic express Milton's crucial role in this transformation and his influential invention and representation of new forms of politics, religion, gender, subjectivity and other seminal ideologies, discourses and institutions of an emerging bourgeois society. In particular we will be concerned with the relationship between external and internal change, with psycho-history, the development of new modes of masculine and feminine subjectivity, and gendered representations of the conflict between aristocratic and bourgeois society.

Given this inter-disciplinary approach students will be responsible not only for close readings of the poems, but also secondary readings in both the criticism and relevant history.

Some of this material will be presented in students' reports which, along with a final paper will be required.