Renaissance Studies U831.01 (3-4 credits)
Early Modern Trans-Atlantic Encounters
Prof M Elsky
Tues 4:15-6:15
Spring 1997
Cross-listed with English U804.02 and Spanish
U762
The premise of this interdisciplinary course is that scholarship has
not sufficiently reflected the notion that the Atlantic in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected rather than separated
cultures and economies. The course will thus propose models for
recontextualizing both European and American cultures in relation to
each other; it will explore the principle of exchange as opposed to
internal coherence as a general framework for the study of cultures
that can profitably be studied as porous rather than bounded and
self-contained. The general focus of the course will be the analysis
of how European cultures were received and transformed in the New World
by colonial and indigenous peoples, and how colonial and indigenous
cultures were received in, and in turn transformed European culture.
As a colloquium, the course will consist of invited weekly speakers
from CUNY and from other universities. It will include topics from
literature, art history, history, and anthropology. The
geographical focus of the course include Anglophone
and Hispanic cultures in Europe and the New World, including British
North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
This course is being offered in conjunction with the 1997 CUNY Renaissance
Studies Conference of the Renaissance Society of America:
It is being offered in conjunction with the
Renaissance Studies Program and the Ph.D. Programs in English and in
Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, with which it will be cross-listed. The aim of the colloquium is to expand the material of the conference in a way that directly benefits students.
Weekly speakers will include
Feb 4
Introduction
Feb 11
TBA
Feb 18
Teofilo Ruiz (History, CUNY Graduate School and Brooklyn College), "Inventing the `Other': in the Old World and the New: Self-Representation and Representations of Others in Columbus's Second Voyage"
Feb 25
Rene Garay (Spanish & Portuguese, CUNY Graduate and City College), "Desire and Dominion: Aspects of Gender and Statehood in Iberian Colonial Literature"
March 4
Nina Scott (Spanish & Portuguese, University of Massachuesetts-Amherst), "Crowns, Books and Dead Nuns: Female Religious Portraiture in Colonial Mexico and Colombia"
March 11
Mary Fuller (Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "England and America 1587-1620: Reassessing the Tropes of Discovery"
March 18
Barbara Bowen (English, CUNY Graduate School and Queens College), "Women Writing the Black Atlantic"
March 25
Roland Greene (Comparative Literature, University of Oregon), "Philip Sidney and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in Transatlantic Perspective"
April 1
Louise Burkhart (Anthropology, SUNY Albany), "Nahuas, Franciscans, and the Theater: An Early Mexican Holy Week Drama"
April 8
Richard Kagan (History, Johns Hopkins University), "Looking at the Colonial City: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective".
April 15
Claire Farago (Art History, University of Colorado-Boulder), "Cross-Cultural Study of the Renaissance: A Case History"
April 29
Susan Danforth (Curator, Maps & Prints, John Carter Brown Library), "Europe Assesses the Americas, 1492-1800: A Look at the Graphic and Cartographic Record"
May 6
Eloise Quinones Keber (Art History, CUNY Graduate School and Baruch College), "From Mexica to Mexican: What Happened to Aztec Art After the Conquest?"
May 13
Concluding discussion
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