ART. 75010 - Art in Northern Italy 1400-1600 GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Santore, [94347]

Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in the Veneto, Lombardy, and Emilia will be examined.

Special attention will be given to the work of the Bellini, Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian, Bordone, and Palma Vecchio.

New themes and trends in Venetian painting, such as the introduction of genre scenes, and developments in portraiture, will be studied. The influences of fifteenth-century Flemish and Florentine painting on Venetian artists will be addressed.

The cultural forces that provided the impetus for the burgeoning of images of the female nude will be presented, and new interpretations of such imagery will be discussed.

We will also study the distinctive structures peculiar to Venetian architecture, the application of the classical orders, and Islamic influences, on architecture in the Veneto.

ART. 85010 - Trecento Italy: Crossroads GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Saslow, [94390]

At a 1990s symposium on Renaissance historiography, two panelists debated whether the Renaissance should be mainly understood as a revival of classical art and ideas or as the cradle of the "early modern": their respondent proposed instead that it be viewed as the final phase of the Middle Ages.

The best answer is that it was all three at once. If the 14^th century was, in Johan Huizinga’s famous phrase, "the autumn of the middle ages," it was also the early spring of modern times, and the second half of Antiquity.

This seminar will focus on the 1300s in Italy as a crucial hinge in the long European transition from a feudal, medieval, exclusively Christian culture to a republican, bourgeois, secular and classicizing society. We will examine major cultural centers of the peninsula ranging from the aristocratic courts of Milan and Naples, closely tied to the development of the courtly international Gothic: to the emergent republics -- Florence, Siena, and (briefly) Venice; to the church-dominated culture of Avignon, the papal headquarters in exile, where Italian culture intersected with France and the north.

In addition to a broad grounding in the major stylistic and regional schools, personalities, and monuments of the period, the course will emphasize key issues both within the period itself and in its historiography.

These will include: the contrast in patronage goals and aesthetic ideals between the hereditary military aristocracy and the urban capitalist middle class; the rise of vernacular languages and parallel artistic styles; art as political propaganda; mutual influences within and between Europe, Islan, and farther Asian cultures; the beginnings of classical humanism in literature and philosophy and their impact on the arts; and the utility and limits of social history (the "Black Death" controversy).

Course requirements:

Weekly readings and class discussion, including a written critique of one reading assignment.

Illustrated oral presentation to the class, 30-40 minutes, on a topic to be chosen with instructor’s consultation and approval.

Written version of the talk, with illustrations, footnotes, and bibliography, to be submitted on last scheduled class day (during exam period).

C L. 71000 - Codes & Code Breaking Italian Renaissace Culture GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Paulicelli, [94409] Course taught in Italian.

The seminar will explore the complexity of early modern Italian cultural production and its literary tradition vis-a-vis western European notions of subjectivity and identity formation.

Within the Italian tradition, the role of the literary imagination has been central in shaping and "inventing" various narratives, from that of the nation, to those of the ideal state or city, of the individual as ideal courtier/gentleman or the Prince, of the values of civic virtues and civility, of love, as well as that of the canons of refined prose writing and rhetoric.

Yet, parallel to the creation of canons and precepts an opposed mechanism has lived side by side, either residing in the same texts that aimed at searching and creating an order--such as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier or Machiavelli’s The Prince, Pietro Bembo’s Asolani--or reacting to such texts’ prescriptions, for example Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti and texts written by women writers like Moderata Fonte and her The Worth of Women, Lucrezia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Deficiencies of Men, and Tullia D’Aragona’s Dialogue on the Infinity of Love.

Code-making and code-breaking have been central in Italian Renaissance literary works, representing a sort of battle-field of conflicting narratives and debates on language and style, women, sexuality and gender, visual and verbal culture, intellectual power and politics etc.

The literary genre that epitomizes all these fruitful tensions is the treatise, a genre that witnessed a series of ramifications within the context of "conduct literature" and its theme of the management of the body and the self, politics, language and love. What fuelled the need to narrate the changes occurring in society and institutions at this time were the technological transformations that followed the advent of printing, the geographical discoveries of the existence of "new worlds," and the complex inter-exchange between models of the past and contemporary social practices.

It is in the light of the upheavals that took place in16^th century Italian civil society that we can best consider the massive presence of a literature that investigated both the possibility of expanding, but also of limiting--through the establishment of accepted canons, taste and laws--the potential of the human body and the self, as well as the role of what were to become nations and empires.

After an in-depth review of texts like the above, the course will conclude with a discussion of excerpts from the heretical texts of the likes of Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella and Galileo Galilei. (Seminar taught in Italian)

For further information about the course please contact: epaulicelli@gmail.com

C L. 72000 - The Baroque in Art & Literature GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oppenheimer, [94416]

What is the Baroque? Has the term any clear meaning? Is it essential and useful, even if also often confusing and paradoxical, as a designation of a profound and major movement in art, literature, politics, science and even warfare during the late sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth centuries? Do there exist crucial if little recognized links between Baroque aesthetics and influential modern ideas of aesthetics, even in physics?

The course will consider these and related questions in terms of the thought and work of Caravaggio, Rubens, Bruegel, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Cervantes, Sidney, the German poet-astronomer Andreas Gryphius, Descartes, Milton and, latterly, Rembrandt and Einstein. Readings will include:

Shakespeare: Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Winter’s Tale.

Paul Oppenheimer: Rubens: A Portrait: Beauty and the Angelic.

Cervantes: Exemplary Stories. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques.
Roy Strong: Art and Power. Sydney: Arcadia (selections).

Poems by Donne, et al (as noted above; some, as by Gryphius, in bilingual presentations).

Margaret D. Wilson ed.: The Essential Descartes.

Selected readings from and on modern poets, artists and scientists.

Supplemental readings:

Judith Hook: The Baroque Age in England.

Arthur Hutchings: The Baroque Concerto.

Germain Bazin: The Baroque: Principles, Styles, Modes, Themes. (In translation.)

[Others to be announced.]

ENGL. 71100 - Renaissance Genres: Shifts in Form & Vision GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Profs. McCoy/Greenfield, [94156]

Walter Benjamin says that "all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one," yet, despite intense political and religious fissures, many of the great works of the Renaissance are less disruptive than weirdly protean in their approach to genre, eccentrically adapting older forms and amorphously anticipating new ones.

This team-taught survey of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature will deal with changes in major works and genres of the period, including the sonnet, chivalric and pastoral romance, epic, allegory, early versions of the novel, and Shakespeare’s anomalous experiments in tragicomedy.

We will discuss the erotic and religious verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Philip Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, John Donne, Ben Johnson, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Mary Wroth, and others including Ralegh, Daniel, Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw.

We will also read significant selections from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and from Sidney’s Arcadia as well as shorter works of prose fiction by Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, and Robert Greene among others.

We will conclude with a discussion of John Milton’s early works as a powerful yet malleable recapitulation of Renaissance forms and themes.

Recent work by Harry Berger, Angus Fletcher, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, Katherine Maus, Patricia Parker, Debora Shuger, and others will provide a critical and scholarly perspective on early modern literature.

Requirements will include an oral presentation, an annotated bibliography due in week 5, a midterm draft due in week 7, and the final term paper due in the last week. We hope that submission of a bibliography and a draft in the first half of the semester will make it easier to produce a polished, substantial, and original final paper by the end of the term.

ENGL. 82300 - Milton & Popular Culture GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Wittreich, [94157]

In his new edition of Milton’s great epic, Philip Pullman writes that "Today, nearly three and a half centuries after Paradise Lost was first published, it is more influencial than ever. It will not go away."

We will read Milton’s poem as an epic of consciousness with special attention to writers who have tried to make Paradise Lost a formative test, especially for the youth of a nation.

Elizabeth Bradburn and Sarah Siddons and, very recently, Nancy Willard have adapted the poem for children.

It is also a foundational text for Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, and for Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and a continual point of reference in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark materials, from which we will read The Amber Spyglass.

Students will be invited to bring into play other works like Stveen Burst’s To Reign in Hell, the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman (The Sandman: Season of Mists), and even Toni Morrison’s Paradise, particularly in view of Pullman’s declaration, "I love the audacity of the poem’s opening-the sheer nerve of Milton’s declaring that he’s going to pursue ‘Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’ How could anyone fail to thrill to a story that begins like this? How could any reader not warm to a poet who dares to say it?"

Though the seminar will fix its attention to Paradise Lost, it will also focus on the broader question of Why Milton Matters?

FREN. 83000 - La Folie a "l'age classique"? GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Stanton, [94357]

L’idéologie du "classicisme français" a servi B cacher, voire B supprimer des aspects du l7ieme siPcle qui ne soutiennent pas le mythe nationaliste d’un age d’or de rationnalité, de bienséance et de politesse. Tout en mettant ce mythe B l’épreuve, ce cours focalisera sur la nature, la variété, et les limites des conceptions de la folie au dix-septiPme siPcle français, un sujet qui n’a pas reçu l’attention qu’il mérite. Nous examinerons, inter alia, l’économie de la folie, ses éléments et ses manifestations politiques, médicales, religieuses, culturelles et littéraires qui sont forcément imbriquées dans la construction de la subjectivité, y compris des facteurs de classe et de genre sexuel, dans une société obsedée par l’idée de l’ordre et du désordre.

Nous commencerons avec le débat entre Foucault et Derrida sur la folie et la déraison chez Descartes; et nous poursuivrons une analyse de la sémantique des symptomes de la folie et de ses différents genres , y compris, la mendacité, la mélancholie, "la fureur utérine," l’hystérie, la perversité sexuelle, la fureur poétique, la possession démoniaque, et l’union mystique, aussi bien que le traitement et le renfermement de ceux et celles considérés "fous." Nos lectures combineront des textes de divers champs disciplinaires (la médecine, la pénalité, la physiognomie, la philosophie, les traités sur les sorciers/sorciPres et sur les maladies d’amour) avec des textes littéraires (poétiques, dramatiques et moralistes) pour considérer leur rapport intertextuel et les facons dont (et les degrPs auxquels) ils s’influencent mutuellement.

Nos lectures comprendront, au delá de Foucault, de Derrida et de Descartes, Beys, Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, Ferrand, Guyon, Joubert, La Rochefoucauld, LeBrun, MoliPre, Pascal, Racine, Régnier, Saint-Amant, Théophile de Viau et Venette.

Le travail du cours comprendra un devoir de 20 pages, un exposé en classe, et un examen final.

Pour toute question sur ce cours, adressez-vous B domna stanton (dstanton112@aol.com).

MUS. 86500 - Monteverdi - Beginning of Baroque GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hanning, [94083]

This seminar will investigate the interrelationship and changing styles of poetry and music in the secular genres of madrigal, solo song, and early opera from about 1580 to 1640.

Monteverdi's role in the emergence of early Baroque styles and genres will be a central theme, but other composers, from Rore to Gesualdo, will also be represented.

A reading knowledge of Italian is desirable but not essential.

SPAN. 82200 - Seminar: Spanish Literature of the Baroque GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Schwartz, [94109]

See also

CLAS. 71100 - Herodotus H: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Green, [94008]

PHIL. 76000 - Plato's Republic GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Vasiliou, [94462]