COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Spring 2002
RSCP. 82100 - Research Techniques in Renaissance Studies T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Clare Carroll [50123] {Cross listed with C L 71000 }
An introduction on how to do research in Renaissance studies; how to define a research topic and how to locate, read, and contextualize texts. We will study how recent developments in historiography and critical theory have redefined research in the interdisciplinary field of Renaissance Studies. The survey of research methodologies will include secondary and primary bibliography, paleography, textual editing, and translation. Students will have the opportunity to work on their own research projects in their own disciplines. Our collective goal will be to produce a guide to doing research in the early modern period at rare book collections in New York City. The course is designed for students of all levels and in a variety of fields (literature, history, art history) within the early modern period. Students may work on any research topic, and this topic may be related to future work on both the orals and the dissertation. Requirements: brief exercises in the various methodologies, tailored to the students’ own projects; a description of the resources in Renaissance Studies at a local rare book collection; an annotated bibliography and prospectus for the individual research project.(Counts as textual editing course for students in the Ph.D. Program in English)
ART. 71500 - Italian Renaissance Painting/Sculpture GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Laurie S. Adams, [50294]
This course covers the painting and sculpture of the fifteenth-century in Italy, focusing on the innovations in Florence and on the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Rimini, and Naples. Works are considered from different methodological viewpoints as well as within their cultural and intellectual contexts. A small amount of architecture is also considered. There will be a midterm and a final based on slide identifications and analysis of reading material.
ART. 72000 - Sacred/Profane Early Netherlandish PaintingGC: T,
4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Lane, [50295]
An investigation of the current controversy over the meanings and purposes of early Netherlandish religious paintings. Lectures will examine recent challenges to traditional interpretations of major works by Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling, and will involve students in the debate over the concept of "disguised symbolism." Problems of sources, attribution, chronology, and technique will also be considered. Five (5) auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.
ART. 81500 - Italian Renaissance Drawings GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Janet Cox- Rearick, [50304]
This seminar will introduce a small group of students (8 maximum registration due to the rules at the museums' drawing study rooms) to the study of 15th and 16th century Italian Renaissance drawings and to the literature on their connoisseurship and theory. Meetings: the emphasis will be on study of the rich collections of drawings in the drawing departments of New York museums. Except for the first meeting and the last meetings (for student reports), the class will meet at the Metropolitan Museum, Drawings Department and the Lehman Collection; and at the Morgan Library, where the restoration laboratory will also be visited. We will also visit a private collection of drawings. Prerequisite: a general course on Italian Renaissance art, preferably both 15th and 16th centuries, but 16th century is the most important. Reading knowledge of Italian is desirable but not required. Auditors not permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.
ENGL. 72000 - Renaissance Poetry GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Martin Elsky, [50658]
A survey of sixteenth and seventeenth century lyric poetry. Emphasis on text, context, and critical approach. Two themes that will be stressed are 1) print and manuscript circulation of poetry; and 2) the development of privacy. We will consider the shift from amateur writing to professional authorship, the changing means of production and circulation of texts, and the use of literary writing to negotiate one's place in society. We will also consider how a new sense of the public realm in turn spawned the poetic articulation of privacy. Of special interest will be the way literary works reflect public and private architectural spaces, including religious introspection, sexual intimacy, and the idea of the home. Readings will include Wyatt, Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Lanyer, Marvell.
ENGL. 80900 - Race in the Renaissance GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Thomas Hayes, [50675]
We will read Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, and Aphra Behn’s Orookono with special attention to the representation of racial and ethnic difference. We will try to determine how the ethnography of biological racism, rooted in the discourse of the natural sciences, displaced theological discourse and ascertain how our attitudes and fantasies regarding racial and ethnic difference continue to influence our reading of these and other Renaissance works. We will also examine the ways racial and ethnic difference intersect with sexual difference in these texts and explore significant similarities and differences between the representation of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism in the Renaissance and today. We will read representative critical essays written from feminist, new historicist, post-structuralist, post-colonialsit, and psychoanalytic perspectives and discuss how we would teach the above-named texts as well as others that call upon us to deal with racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. A term paper (15-25pp.) And active participation in class discussions are required.
ENGL. 82100 - Lit & 17C Cultural Revolution GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Jacqueline Di Salvo, [50680] Cross listed with WSCP 81000
This class will contrast the construction of two islands -- that of Shakespeare's Tempest in 1613 and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe about a hundred years later to launch an inquiry into the century of revolution in between them that created the foundations of modern society and culture. What happens to the Renaissance that, in the most drastic literary evolution ever, we go in a century from Shakespeare's poetic drama and Spenserian allegory via Milton's exhaustion of epic to Defoe's creation of the prose novel? Employing the concepts of Foucault's episteme, Bakhtin's chronotope, Marx's ideology, Gramsci's hegemony. Jameson's ideologeme and Habermas' public sphere, this course will interrogate the roots of the master discourses and founding values, myths and institutions of our bourgeois society. Focusing on Milton, the first conscious cultural revolutionary, as the crux of this "Great Transformation" we will historicize his works via Christopher Hill, Norbert Elias and others from a cultural materialist, feminist and psycho-historical stance within a wider context of seventeenth century writers. Setting Milton against selections from Shakespeare (Tempest), Ben Jonson (Bartholemew Fair), the Court masque, religious and political prose (Winstanley, Coppe, Filmer, Hobbes, Locke), metaphysical (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw), Cavalier (Jonson, Herrick) and Restoration (Rochester) poetry and Aphra Behn, we will consider such issues as the re-invention of gender, the construction of subjectivity and oedipalization of the psyche, anti-Petrarchianism and the reconfiguring of marriage, family, and sexuality, the gendered split of public and private, and the move from punishment to discipline. We will examine the invention of vocation and the work ethic, the culture wars of Puritan literacy vs royal spectacle and Bakhtin's popular carnivale, the poetic move from sacramentalism to iconoclasm, from court masque to Milton's closet drama, the disenchantment of nature, decline of magic, and persecution of witches, republican art, and the effects of primitive accumulation and possessive individualism not only on politics but on psychology, religion and literature. By placing seventeenth century cultural production within various theories of the early modern we will try to develop a dialectical approach to its appropriation/subversion in contemporary cultural criticism to create a legacy to ongoing cultural revolution.
FREN. 82000 - Conte 16e depuis M de Navarre GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Francesca Sautman, [50259]
La littérature du 16e siècle francais a produit un corpus impressionnant de contes de tous genres. Des raconteurs, nobles ou roturiers, se complaisent en anecdotes, témoignages vrais ou faux, facéties, récits édifiants, voire effrayants, relectures de récits mythologiques, contes merveilleux... Conter devient une sorte de frénésie narrative qui opère souvent dans le domaine de la fiction pure en monnayant le vrai (le vécu, l’observé) devenu commodité échangeable, tout en offrant des solutions particulières à la continuité du merveilleux déjà élaboré au Moyen Age. Le cours envisagera comment le conte au 16e s’investit dans les rapports entre imaginer/imager, entre narration et représentation, entre construction d’un discours réaliste et usages du merveilleux, entre traditions populaires et culture des élites. D’autre part, le phénomène de contage au 16e se produit simultanément à la comptabilité nécessaire à la société marchande. On conte donc, et on compte: en quoi cela différe-t-il du conte médiéval, lié à la société bourgeoise? Accumulation et dénombrement des biens, objets, et territoires acquièrent une autre dimension dans ce 16e siècle, époque dite des "grandes découvertes," des aventures et conquêtes ultramarines, de pillage et de colonisation de pays lointains, des débuts de la Traite des esclaves, où s’inscrivent un nouvel imaginaire "américain" et se pose avec force le problème de la "violence de la représentation". Peut-on dire que conter et compter—termes linguistiquement proches dans toute une série de langues indo-européennes—créent ensemble une structure d’échange particulière, de mains en mains, de bouche à oreille, de récit en texte et en support textuel, dans lequel les objets seraient au centre de nouvelles stratégies de représentation, liées par exemple aux développements dans les arts picturaux? Nous envisagerons enfin le rôle du simulacre comme terme clé dans l’échange, et comme lien entre la matérialité et l’imaginaire. Course taught in French. Primary texts in French. Some critical reading in English. Students in other programs may do all their work, oral and written, in English.
SPAN. 72500 - Lope de Vega & the Spanish Comedy GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ocatvio Di Camillo, [50130]
This course will focus on a few major dramatists and some of the works that best exemplify the main trends in the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age. After a brief overview of sixteenth-century dramatic experimentation as found in court theatre, university plays and religious representations, we will examine the commercialization of dramatic performance, the construction of public playhouses and the emergence of the nueva comedia, as defined by Lope de Vega, which will become the dominant form of dramatic representation. Besides analyzing the dramatic techniques, the peculiar elements and the main features that make up this new genre, attention will be paid to recurrent motifs, aesthetic and popular taste, ideological representation of noble and rural characters in their public and private behavior, passion and morality, power and justice, socio-economic and religious issues as well as ethical and philosophical problems. Texts to be analyzed include: Cervantes’s, La destruición de Numancia; Lope de Vega’s, El caballero de Olmedo and Peribañez y el comendador de Ocaña Calderón’s, La vida es sueño and El alcalde de Zalamea; Tirso de Molina’s, El burlador de Sevilla and Alarcón’s, La verdad sospechosa.
HIST. 78900 - Jews in Early Modern Europe 1492-1760 GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 noon, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Elisheva Carlebach, [50410]
For information, contact the Ph.D. Program in History 212/817-8430
MUS. 86700 - Words & Music in Renaissance GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. 3491, 3 credits, Profs. Allan Atlas/Barbara Hanning, [50067] Permission of Instructor required.
A detailed look at the various ways in which music and words interacted during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Prof. Atlas will concentrate on the "fixed forms" of the fifteenth century-mainly French, but also Italian and Spanish-and the many issues that they raise, including the so-called "abbreviated" rondeau, combinative chansons, motet-chansons, contrafacta, performance practice, and problems of authenticity and dissemination in connection with individual pieces. Prof. Hanning will consider Italian secular music of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: analysis of the verse forms of Petrarch, Tasso, Guarini, and others; discussion of the influence of the semantic and sonic values of their texts on settings principally of madrigals by humanist composers from Willaert to Monteverdi. (Prior knowledge of Italian is helpful but not necessary.) Students will make two formal presentations and submit a short paper in connection with each one. Finally, students should read the following items prior to class: (1) the essays by Giamatti and Flescher on Italian and French versification, respectively, in Versification: Major Language Types, ed. W.K. Wimsatt (New York: MLA and New York University Press, 1972), and (2) the article by Leeman Perkins, "Towards a Theory of Text-Music Relations in the Music of the Renaissance," in Binchois Studies, ed. Andrew Kirkman and Dennis Slavin (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
PHIL. 76000 - Descartes GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Frederick Purnell, [50286]
The course will focus on a close reading and analysis of Descartes' principal philosophical works, including Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy and The Passions of the Soul, with selections from the objections and replies to the Meditations and his correspondence. Particular attention will be paid to Descartes' connections with earlier authors and his influence on Continental Rationalism.