RENAISSANCE STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

SPRING 2004

RSCP. 82100 - Research Techniques in Renaissance Studies GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Clare Carroll, [62066] Cross listed with C L 71000

An introduction to 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. 72500 - Art in Europe, 1648-1784 GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Judy Sund, [62108]

This course will survey artistic production, institutions and patronage throughout Europe, with particular attention to French aesthetics and the pan-European influence of the Parisian scene.

Discussion begins with the founding of the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts (1648), and the long shadows cast into the 18th Century by 17th-century luminaries (Rubens, Bernini, Poussin) and well as the "Little Dutch Masters."

The course will include in-depth examinations of the careers of Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Tiepolo, Hogarth, and concludes with David’s now-iconic Neo-Classic essay, The Oath of the Horatii (1784).

Auditors permitted.

ART. 81500 - Pontormo, Rosso & Bronzino GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Janet Cox-Rearick, [62115]

Students will investigate the late Renaissance style in painting, sculpture, and architecture known as Mannerism (ca. 1520-70).

Although Mannerism became widely diffused, its birthplace was central Italy, particularly Florence, and its main expression was in painting and drawing.

The seminar will concentrate on the work of the three major Florentine Mannerist painters: Pontormo and Rosso, who belonged to the first generation, known as primo manierismo, and Pontormo’s pupil Bronzino, the major expondent of la Bella Maniera in the mid-16th century.

A seminar on this subject is timely. Stimulated by the 500th anniversaries of the births of Pontormo and Rosso (1494) and Bronzino (1503), scholars have published much new research in the last decade, such as monographs on Pontormo (Costamagna, 1994), Rosso (Franklin, 1995), and Bronzino (Brock, 2002), and there have been major exhibitions (L’Officina della maniera, 1996; and The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, 2002).

Florentine Mannerism is by no means a closed subject, and these and other new publications provide a basis for a revaluation of the work of Pontormo, Rosso, and Bronzino.

In addition to a close study of these three painters, students in the seminar will review the historiography of Mannerism--a 20th century phenomenon which reflects changing trends in art history, as well as current discourses about the subject.

Drawings by these and other Mannerist artists will also be studied in a visit to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and possibly other collections.

Requirements: seminar members will give several brief reports before spring break. The last two weeks of the seminar will be devoted to presentations on the subject of the final paper, which will deal with a topic chosen by the student on one of the three artists.

Recommended prerequisite: a survey course in Italian High and Late Renaissance art. Reading knowledge of Italian is desirable but not required.

Auditors not permitted.

ENGL. 82100 - Sacrament, Sign and Show Biz in the Early Modern Era GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Richard McCoy, [62271]

The Protestant Reformation caused enormous political upheavals as well as a profound cultural revolution that has been described as a "crisis of the sign."

In the words of contemporary ballads, "God’s sacraments" were reduced to "Uncertain signs and tokens bare," and "blessings turned to blasphemies."

Yet, despite fierce iconoclasm and the suppression of miracle and mystery plays, allegory continued to flourish in pageantry and verse and drama continued to evoke the numinous and mystical.

We will focus on a number of classic plays, such as Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear, and Pericles (in performance at BAM), and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, selections from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, masques by Jonson and Milton, and religious lyrics by Donne, Herbert, and others, exploring the epistemology of figurative language and concepts of presence and representation.

We will also discuss the importance of emblematic and visual imagery, using Blackboard as a means for viewing and examining examples.

ENGL. 82300 - Paradise Lost and Some Romantic Reincarnations GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Joseph Wittreich, [62273]

It has been said that with the publication of Paradise Lost Milton effects a revolution in the history of literature, with Paradise Lost, subsequent to its publication in 1667, leaving its imprint everywhere, on poetry and prose alike.

We will read Paradise Lost, along with Paradise Regain’d, and then examine their formative influence on such works as William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Milton, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Lord Byron’s Cain.

We will look at lines of connection between Milton and these writers, some of which are established by authors who, in conversation with one another about Milton, give us an amplified sense of what Christopher Cauldwell calls "Miltonic Romanticism."

Requirements: 1 oral presentation, and an end-of-term essay of approximately twenty (20) pages.

ENGL. 87200 - Metaphysical and Postmodern Poets GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Thomas Hayes, [62269]

Richard Rambuss has written that "The metaphysicals, with their characteristic mise-en-scene of the spiritual bordering the carnal, the sacred abutting the profane, supply what are perhaps the most provocative grounds for interrogating the orthodoxies of current scholarship on devotion, desire, and the body; indeed, the volatile heterodoxies of these poets make such reconsideration a requisite.

Achieving their effects with a rhetoric of the extreme and often deliberately courting the perverse, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and their fellows have accrued from their own time down into ours more charges of excess, indecorousness, and queerness than one finds imputed to any other early modern literary practice" (Closet Devotions 17-18).

With this in mind, this course will explore the premise that there is an analogy between the metaphysical poets and poets that have been called postmodern. That is, just as John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan revolted against the smooth, sensuous, Petrarchan poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Wyatt, and Ben Jonson, poets such as John Ashbery, Silvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O’Hara (who has been called "the quintessential postmodern poet") – reacted against such modern masters as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens.

The possibilities for comparison here are enormous. For example, we will explore how Plath’s anti-patriarchal "Daddy" answers Eliot’s pious "Four Quartets" and how Rich’s angry "Diving Into the Wreck" might be read as a response to Auden’s serene ode to Yeats, just as her "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" echoes Donne’s poem by that same name. (Another example of a postmodern poet echoing a metaphysical poet is Ashbery’s "The Picture of Little J.A. In a Prospect of Flowers," and Marvell’s "The Picture of Little T.C. In a Prospect of Flowers.") The key texts are of course the poems mentioned above.

Also helpful are:

George Herbert and the 17th-Century Religious Poets, ed.
Mario A. Di Cesare. Norton.

The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner, Penguin.

Sona Raiziss, The Metaphysical Passion: Seven Modern American Poets and the 17th-Century Tradition

Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

Beat Poets, ed. Carmela Ciuraru, Everyman’s

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, U of Minnesota

Craig Owens, "Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," in Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. U of California.

HIST. 80500 - Literature of Early Modern Europe II:1600-1800 GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 5 credits, Prof. Helena Rosenblatt, [62074]

MUS. 86700 - Iconography: Music and Society in the 17th & 18th Centuries GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. GSUC3491, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Hanning, [62328]

The course will study paintings on musical subjects, principally from the 17th and 18th centuries, and how they reveal the ways in which music as an embodied practice, a physical activity subject to the gaze, encodes complex and multiple levels of meaning.

Topics will include emblem books as a source of the visual vocabulary of the Baroque affections; images of early monody; musical themes in art of the Dutch Golden Age; representations of music-making in the 18th-century French salon; and the relationship between musical performance practice and the depiction of performance in art.

Special attention will be paid to the treatment in art of women musicians, including amateurs and professionals, saints and muses.

SPAN. 82100 - Seminar: Cervantes Studies GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Isaías Lerner, [62290]

SPAN. 82200 - Seminar: Spanish Literature of the Baroque GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Lía Schwartz, [62293]

SEE AlSO: RSCP STUDENTS ARE WELCOME IN THIS COURSE

ART. 72000 - Art in Paris from Jean Pucelle to Jean Fouquet GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. William Clark, [62107]

An introduction to French art from the courtly Rayonnant style of the early 14th century to the beginnings of Late Gothic and French Renaissance art in the early 16th century.

We will explore the major transformations in Parisian architecture, sculpture, and painting, with special emphasis on manuscript painting, as reflections of the changes in society.

Preliminary Bibliography (To Look At, not Read) on Paris:

B. de Andia, ed., Les enceintes de Paris. Paris, 2001

R. Cazelles, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris de la fin du rPgne de Philippe Auguste B la mort de Charles V, 2nd ed., Paris, 1998

J. Favier, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, Paris au Xve siPcle, 2nd ed, Paris, 1997

On the art of the period:

F.Avril, ed., Jean Fouguet. Peintre et enlumineur du Xve siPcle, Paris, 2003

F. Avril and N. Reynaud, eds. Les manuscrits B peintures en France 1440-1520. Paris, 1993

D. Gaborit--Chopin, L’art au temps des rois maudits. Philippe le Bel et ses fils, Paris, 1998

D. Gaborit-Chopin and F. Avril, 1300. ,l’art au temps de Philippe le Bel, Paris, 2001

F Pleybert, ed., Paris et Charles V, Paris, 2001 - -

C. Sterling, La peinture médiévale B Paris 1300 B 1500,2 v., Paris, 1987 and 1990