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COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS
Fall
2009
RSCP.
72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies: Folly & Madness GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof.
Carroll, [96534] Cross listed with C L 71000
Our point of departure will be the first chapter of
Foucault’s Histoire de la folie in which he mediates on the transition
from the representation of human error as sin to the folie (folly/madness) of
the sixteenth century.
The first lecture includes an examination of the visual art that Foucault
describes.
We will also examine the subsequent critiques of his work, and the biblical,
classical, as well as medieval sources of the Renaissance representation of
folly.
Readings: Erasmus, Encomium Moriae (Praise of Folly); More, Utopia;
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso; Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel ;
lyric poetry by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare; Shakespeare, Hamlet,
King Lear; and Cervantes, Don Quixote.
Seminar requirements: one oral presentation and a paper.
RSCP.
83100 - The Italian Renaissance GC:
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. King, [96535] Cross
listed with HIST 70500
From about 1300
to 1600, the civilization emerging from the city-states and princely courts
of northern Italy set the pattern for all of Europe.
In the visual and performing arts, in literature and thought, in manners,
statecraft, diplomacy, espionage, and war, ltalian models predominated,
making the civilization of the ltalian Renaissance important to study as a
phenomenon of interest both in itself and for its consequences elsewhere.
In each weekly session of this overview of the ltalian Renaissance, after an
introduction by the instructor (20-30 minutes), we will read and discuss
together, at the rate of just under one book per student per week (8-10 per
student per semester), a set of monographs pertaining to a particular theme
or problem.
Students will prepare an abstract (500-750 words) of each reading, which will
be circulated to all students and the instructor in advance of the class.
Abstracts will identify the author's thesis, present the structure of the
work and major arguments, comment on sources used and controversies
addressed, and briefly report on the views of three reviewers for major
journals (accessible online).
Grades will be based on abstracts (80%), presentations (10%), and
participation (10%). Books have not been placed on reserve. Students should
obtain them via interlibrary loan or by purchase. Students may choose their
books in advance, clearing them first with the instructor.
For background, see Margaret L. King, The Renaissance in Europe (New
York: McGraw-Hill; London: Laurence King, 2005). There are used copies
available, and the British edition, which is cheaper, can be ordered from http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Syllabus
available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
ART.
75010 - Renaissance Sculpture: Ghiberti-Michelangelo GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits,
Prof. Richter, [96885] Open only to Art History students Permission of
Executive Officer required for all others.
A
basic paragone of the Renaissance centered on the debate over the primacy of
painting versus sculpture.
Despite Leonardo’s claim that the painter employed greater mental effort
whereas the sculpture expended mostly physical energy many of his contemporaries
thought otherwise.
Vasari (Lives of the Artists, 1550-1568) reserved his highest praise
for Michelangelo. In doing so, he followed the lead of the great
humanist-architect Alberti who dedicated his Della Pictura to five
colleagues: Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, and
Masaccio, who, with the exception of the last, were all sculptors.
This lecture course will focus on the casters, modelers, and carvers of the
15th century.
Topics of discussion will include the decoration of such great civic and
community centers as the Baptistery, the guild church of Orsanmichele and the
Campanile of Florence as well as those projects initiated by private
enterprise.
Attention will be given not only to individual artists, but also to specific
themes such as the humanist portrait and tomb.
The focus will expand beyond Florence to encompass other Tuscan centers as
well as northern Italy.
From a theoretical viewpoint, several contemporary texts will be considered
including Alberti’s De Statua (1433) and Ghiberti’s Commentarii
Course requirements include a research paper and a final, take-home
exam. Three (3) auditors permitted.
Preliminary reading: Roberta J.M. Olson, Italian Renaissance
Sculpture, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992;John Pope-Hennessy, Italian
Renaissance Sculpture, London: Phaidon, 2000 (ppbk ed.)
ART.
75050 - Baroque Art: Van Dyck-Rembrandt GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits,
Prof. Atkins, [96886] Open only to Art History students Permission of
Executive Officer required for all others.
This course will
explore the proliferation of portraiture in the seventeenth-century in
Flanders, England, and the Dutch Republic. We will study the various
permutations of this phenomenon from state portraits to images of the new
merchant elite to group portraits of civic guards to self portraits.
In so doing we will probe how portraits functioned, the emerging
self-awareness registered by many of these images, the roles of
self-consciously crafted styles, and the place of portraiture within artists’
business strategies.
Major figures who will receive extended consideration include Van Dyck,
Rubens, Hals, and Rembrandt, among others. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Readings: Westermann, Mariët. A Worldly
Art: The Dutch Republic 1585-1718. Yale University, rev. ed. 2004.
C
L. 80105 - Arte e Letterature nel Rinasc NYU: W, 1:00-3:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof.
Bolzoni, [96829] Course taught in Italian.
C
L. 80900 - Ludovico Ariosto to T Tasso GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits,
Prof. Calabritto, [96815]
The third and
final edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in forty-six cantos was
published in 1532, a year before the author’s death.
The
Orlando Furioso can be defined as a hybrid text, mostly constituted of
elements taken from the genres of chivalric romance and epic. It contaminates
styles, languages and themes, all of which derive from various sources.
Since its second edition (1521), the Orlando Furioso had a great
success and soon acquired what Daniel Javitch calls a “canonical status”.
Tasso concluded the Gerusalemme liberata in twenty cantos in 1575,
which he submitted for several years to a painstaking revision and to the
evaluation and comments of several critics chosen by the author himself.
While Tasso was confined to the hospital of Sant’Anna in Ferrara, an
incomplete version of the text was printed in 1581 without the author’s
permission. A complete edition was printed in 1582.
Tasso intended the Gerusalemme liberata to follow the model of the
epic poem rather than that of the chivalric romance. Tasso wrote a poem that
showed more structural and thematic unity than Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
He was deeply influenced on the structural level by Aristotle’s Poetics,
a text of fundamental theoretical importance in the sixteenth century.
Unlike Ariosto, Tasso expressed his theoretical view on the epic genre in
many letters and in two treatises, Discorsi dell'arte poetica e del poema
eroico (1587) and Discorsi del poema eroico (1594).
Tasso was also affected by the renewed religious spirit of the Catholic
Reformation, which provided him with the themes of the crusade against the
infidels and of the conquest of the Holy Land. However, he elaborated within
the tight structure of the Gerusalemme liberata episodes centered on
love, wandering and magic, typical of the chivalric genre.
The course investigates the nature, structure and main themes—love, war, and
wandering—of the two poems in the light of the debate over the genre of epic
poetry that started after the publication of the third edition of the Orlando
Furioso and continued throughout the sixteenth century.
Besides the Orlando Furioso and the Gerusalemme liberata, we
will read excerpts from Boiardo’s Orlando inamorato, the Cinque
Canti that Ariosto composed between 1518 and 1527 that were eliminated
from the final edition of the Orlando Furioso, several letters that
Tasso wrote between 1575 and 1577 to the critics of his poem and sections
from his Discorsi dell'arte poetica e del poema eroico and Discorsi
del poema eroico.
With the help of several interpretations offered by recent critical studies
on the two texts, the course traces the multifaceted nature of the three main
themes of love, war, and wandering in the context of the Italian states in
the sixteenth century, the literary debate on the notion of epic and
chivalric genres, the philosophical discussion on the notion of love, passion
and insanity, and the theological debate on faith, miracles and religious
militancy.
Reading list available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
ENGL.
71100 - Spenser's Queens GC:
M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Staines, [96618]
Queens appear the
early-modern British imagination as objects of both desire and revulsion,
fear and admiration.
In confronting their confusion over a female body with the “heart and stomach
of a king” and their anxiety over the “monstrous regiment” of women heading
the patriarchal order, poets (male and female) employ their rhetoric to speak
to, shape, and master the royal image, simultaneously celebrating and
resisting the seductive power of queenship.
This course will focus on the various guises under which Spenser engages
Elizabeth and her opposite Mary Queen of Scots in The Faerie Queene,
the fullest, most brilliant of these conflicted meditations on the problems
of modern monarchy and queenship.
Together we will read The Faerie Queene, with some attention to
Spenser’s shorter lyrics (The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s
Come Home Again, Amoretti).
We will read these poems against other representations of Elizabeth
(especially her own speeches) and Mary Queen of Scots (like the forged
sonnets of “Casket Letters”), also giving some attention to other
contemporary poets (Philip and Mary Sidney, Walter Ralegh, Mary Wroth).
Some issues to consider: the poet as political counselor; sex and gender in
religious and political polemics; the gendering of romance, epic, and lyric;
mutuality vs. hierarchy in Protestant sexuality and marriage; the place of
emotions in political life; male counsel and the paradox of the “Elizabeth’s
monarchical republic.”
Each student will also prepare an oral presentation and a final paper.
ENGL.
81100 - Speaking in Tongues: The Ethics and Performativity of Early Modern
Prose Genres GC: M, 6:30-8:30
p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [96650]
The
post-Derridean persistence of the problem of language reference throws light
on the emergence of early modern prose genres as a response to the moral
dilemmas of performative language.
Historians of philosophy credit early modern pedagogical practice with
initiating a shift in habits of reasoning that stressed the relative,
circumstantial nature of truth and its expression in language, which thus
acquired the character of theatricality.
The result was a privileged position for rhetoric and literary language (over
philosophy) as a performance of imagined voices.
This theatricality led to an ethical crisis for those whose social status
depended on skill in expression: is there a line between authentic
performance and imposture, dissimulation, and pandering for position.
These issues underlie the formation of early modern prose genres, their
experiments with new stylistic formulas, and the spaces they imagine as the
settings of performed speech (the public and private spaces of the domestic
interior, the court, the solitary tower, the council chamber, and the
uninhabited outdoors).
Genres will include: the Humanist dialogue and the theatricality of
counter-balanced voices; the courtesy book and prescriptions for performing
effects in spectators for social advancement; the prose romance and the
performance of gender; the commonplace book and reading as a meditation on
the moral ambiguities of performing praise in verse.
We will also look at prose genres that seek a way out of the dilemmas of
performance, genres that had an impact far beyond the early modern period:
the invention of the personal essay and the return to philosophical prose
through fragmented, discontinuous discourse.
We will end with an autobiography by a poet-musician who sought to escape the
performed life through the printed book.
Readings will include More’s Utopia,
Castiglione’s Book of
the Courtier, Sidney’s Arcadia
(Book I), Jonson’s Discoveries,
Montaigne’s Essais,
Bacon’s New Organon,
and Thomas Whythorne’s Discourses
of [his] Life (an undeservedly under-read book).
ENGL.
81400 - Shakespearean Masculinities GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4
credits, Prof. DiGangi, [96632]
Masculinity, long
a topic of interest for psychoanalytic and new historicist Shakespeare
critics, has become central to recent work by feminist materialists, queer
theorists, and social historians.
Using
insights from various critical approaches, we will explore questions such as
the following: through what representational strategies (sartorial, gestural,
vocal, rhetorical, erotic) is manhood staged in early modern theater and
culture? How is masculine identity
inflected by distinctions of social status, age, wealth, profession,
sexuality, nationhood, or race? How
might an analysis of the multiple forms of masculinity unsettle the notion of
a monolithic patriarchal culture? What
role might the study of masculinity play in recent debates between
historicist and “presentist” Renaissance critics?
We
will examine both canonical and less familiar texts from throughout
Shakespeare’s career, as well as some texts by his contemporaries.
Requirements include class presentations, brief responses, and a research
paper.
FREN.
83000 - Writing Women 17 Century France GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits,
Prof. Stanton, [96878] Cross listed with WSCP 81000
This course will
examine the varieties of female writing in the century of Louis XIV in light
of debates about women’s participation in culture and society articulated in
the early modern querelle des femmes,
both the misogynist and pro-woman strains.
We will begin by focusing on gender theory, feminist discussions of the
problematics of women’s writing in a patriarchal symbolic system, and on work
in women’s history that can illuminate
the limitations/possibilities of women’s conditions (for instance, did women
undergo un grand renfermement after
l650, as some have argued?) We will consider the paradoxical status of female
regents and queens, the role of the female-run salons (cercles or ruelles),
and the construction of the précieuse and the femme savante in the querelle des anciens et des modernes as well.
While
attentive to the “modern” genres that women privileged (eg. the novel and nouvelle, the letter, memoir, and
fairy tale), the course will be devoted to close readings of texts by writers
such as Marie de Gournay,Mme de Guyon, Mme de La Fayette,Mme de La Guette,
L’Héritier de Vilandon Mlle de
Montpensier Madeleine de
Scudéry Mme de Sévigné, Gabrielle Suchon, and Mme de Villedieu, , to gauge
contextually their oppositionality and its limits.
Course requirements: A 20-page paper; an oral presentation on a reading; and
a final exam.
The
course will be taught in French; the readings will be in French and in
English
Please address all questions to Domna Stanton (dstanton112@aol.com).
The syllabus will be ready in August.
HIST.
71000 - Literature of Early Mod Europe II GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits,
Prof. Rosenblatt, [96573]
PHIL.
76100 - Late Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits,
Prof. Lackey, [96728]
In 1775 Edward
Gibbon wrote that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire presented “the greatest,
and perhaps the most awful, scene in the history of mankind.”
In the history of philosophy the greatest and perhaps most awful scene is the
decline and fall of the Aristotelian synthesis, which reached its pinnacle in
the two magisterial summae of Thomas Aquinas in the third quarter of
the thirteenth century.
This course will begin with a summary of Aquinas and what he and his
Aristotelian predecessors achieved, and then charts the various forces that,
like wolves surrounding a stag, brought Aquinas’s great system of
interlocking natural kinds crashing down by the middle of the 17th
century.
These forces included (a) Scotus’s rejection of matter as the principle of
individuation (b) Ockham’s exultation of divine omnipotence, and the Ockhamist
doctrine that God can violate the basic laws of Aristotelian logic and
undermine relations among formal causes, (c) Ockham’s nominalism, and his
rejection of universals that brought with it a rejection of natural kinds,
(d) the rise of numerous 14th
century mystical movements, for whom the difference between a man and a dog
is less important than the fact that both of parts of God, (e) the rise of
Platonism and Neoplatonism in 15th century Italy and its attendant
anti-Aristotelian supernaturalism, (f) the rise of Lutheranism in the early
16th century and the Deus abscondit doctrine, which
deprives the created world of any natural goodness, (g) the corresponding
Italian rejection of natural law that brings forth the “murd’rous Machiavel,”
(h) the rise of vitalist materialism in southern Italy towards the end of the
16th century in Telesio and Campanella and other
anti-Aristotelians, (i) last and perhaps least, the development of modern
astronomy and physics, those Jovian satellites, those new stars, etc. that
cast doubt on particular empirical theses of Aristotle.
The course will also consider various rearguard actions on the part of
Aristotelians, Suarez versus the Platonists, Bellarmine versus Galileo, and
so forth.
Some attention will be given to 17th century anti-modernists, like
the Cambridge “Platonists” (Aristotelians, actually) who thought that the New
Science was hopeless as a foundation for either biology or psychology.
Finally, some attention will be given to relations between philosophical movements
and artistic currents, for example, the relation between Nominalism and the
development of 15th century Flemish painting, and Neoplatonism and
the doctrine of ideal form in Italian Renaissance art.
SPAN.
71300 - La Celestina GC: T,
6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Di Camillo, [96925]
SPAN. 82200 - Seminar: Spanish Literatire of the Baroque
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4
credits, Prof. Childers, [96930]
SPAN. 87000 - Theory & Practice in Editing Hispanic Texts GC:
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Neill, [96932]
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