COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Fall 2006

RSCP. 72100 - Early Modern Disseminations: Encounters with European Culture East & West GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [96614] Cross listed with ART 75000/C L 80900 & ENGL 81000.

This course will explore the impact of contact between European and non-European 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 and the eastern Mediterranean, to Tenochtitlan and the Ottoman Empire.

We will begin by considering cartography as the European mapping of its own internally dynamic geographical space and its relation to geographies beyond its borders in the major English and Spanish cartographic projects. We will then consider both the reciprocal effects of encounters between European and non-European cultures on each other and the resulting hybrid forms expressing a range from resistance, absorption, and synthesis.

Themes will include culture as forms in geographic motion, as well as issues of authenticity, imitation, appropriation, and mimicry. Emphasis will be placed on Italian English, French, and Spanish encounters with the New World and the Ottoman Empire. 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; prints, drawings, architecture, and cartography.

Emphasis will be placed on critical approaches and research problems as illustrated in readings from political and cultural history, literary criticism, and art history as applied so such figures as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Cervantes, Garsilaso, Thevet, Léry.

This course satisfies a requirement for the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program, but all students are welcome. Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home discipline for discussion and assignments.

From the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, European women emerged from the silence of the Middle Ages to become eloquent, forceful participants in the mainstream of civilization. At first, primarily those authorized by their holiness – nuns, mystics, tertiaries, anchoresses – spoke of their visions and their mission.

Then, triggered by the first publication in 1361 of On Famous Women by the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, there followed a stream of works, by both men and women, defending the targets of a misogynistic tradition embedded in the respected disciplines of law, medicine, philosophy, and theology.

By the early 1500s, the availability of the print medium and the maturation of the European vernaculars permitted women authors to explore verse and prose fiction, even as the querelle des femmes ("the debate about women") soared to its climax in the first half of the seventeenth century.

By this date, writing by women and about women had moved from periphery to center of European culture, and the major issues pertaining to women’s nature and capacity had been addressed. These were the foundations on which Mary Wollstonecraft erected her manifesto of 1792, challenging her contemporaries to recognize the due rights of woman even as the French Revolution, then still in progress, established the rights of man.

This course examines a few of the key works, originally in Latin and four European vernaculars, that trace this story.

In addition to reading in common the works listed below (weekly readings will average about 100 pages), students will prepare historiographical essays (15-25 pages) based on at least six monographs (or the equivalent), or similar project with the instructor’s approval, due on the date of the scheduled final examination.

Many of the assigned readings are available in inexpensive editions; the library has been asked to place all works on reserve; some smaller selections will be available on E-RES; and one work is available in full online. Online bibliographies of relevant secondary works are available on my website at http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/king/BiblioWomen.htm

and

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/king/OVEMEBibliography.Secondary.050227.pdf.

Bibliographies and course website will be updated by August 1, 2006. (Syllabus available in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109)

FREN. 87500 - Villon GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2 credits, Prof. Sautman, [96555]   Course meets October 10 - December 8.

The course is run as an independent study, and will thus only register a small group of students to a maximum of seven. Students from other Programs are welcome, but priority will be given to students in the French Program, and permission must be given by the French Program. Meetings are in French. Students outside of French may do their oral and written work in English.

This is a workshop/seminar format and all participants, regardless of status, must do at least the oral part of the work. Level 1 and 2-students must register for credit.

Ce mini-séminaire se focalise sur le Testament de Villon (le Lais ayant déjà fait l’objet d’un autre mini-séminaire) et aborde aussi les poésies diverses. Son but est de développer chez les participants un sens critique aïgu par rapport à l’oeuvre de Villon, d’apprendre à interpréter son oeuvre à de multiples niveaux, parfois divergents, parfois simultanés, et de comprendre à la fois sa modernité et comment l’insérer dans son temps.Une bibliographie extensive sur l’état present des recherches sur Villon et une liste d’ouvrages critiques essentiels pour le semestre seront distribuées avant la fin du mois de mai aux étudiants déjà inscrits.

Travail à faire: un court exposé oral sur un passage de l’oeuvre; un travail écrit incorporant approches théoriques et interprétation.

Problèmes et état présent des études sur Villon.- 2. Villon et les traditions littéraires et scolastiques du Moyen Age. – 3. Villon et la culture populaire. – 4. Villon et les théories de l’échange. – 5. Villon et la psychanalyse. – 6. "Queer Villon." – 7. Interpréter Villon: quelques ensembles textuels. – 8. Interpréter Villon: application de modèles théoriques . – 9. exposés étudiants.

PHIL. 76300 - Descartes/Spinoza/Leibniz GC: T, 9:30-11:30 a.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Wilson, [96333]

This course is a survey of the main writings of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. We will begin with a close reading of Descartes’s Meditations, and follow up with a study of Gassendi’s vigorous Objections to them and Descartes’s physical theory before turning to Descartes’s two successors.

Emphasis will be placed on topics such as the following: 1) the 17^th century theory of substance and its relation to scientific developments of the period;2) debates concerning the possibility of thinking matter and "mechanical" life; 3) the god of the philosophers vs. the God of the theologians; 4) determinism, motivation, and the status of the will; 6) perception and emotion; 7) the problem of immortality; 8) concepts of proof, certainty, and demonstration.

We will be concerned with both the systematic unity of these three metaphysical systems and with their various fissures, as well as with the overall question, what if anything is characteristic of rationalist philosophers, their assumptions, commitments, and mode of argumentation, by contrast with empiricists?

Main Readings:

Descartes: Meditations, Treatise of the World/Treatise of Man, Objections and Replies

Spinoza: Ethics

Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics, On Nature Itself, New Essays (selections), Monadology and Principles of Nature and of Grace.

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