ART. 75050 - Vermeer & Dutch Genre GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Binstock, [66069]

Dutch Genre Painting is one of the cruxes of the history of art and art history. First theorized by G. W. F. Hegel as a transition from objective subject matter to subjective form, elaborated in turn by theorists of aesthetics and art history including Marcel Proust and AloVs Riegl, the rise of genre painting, or scenes of everyday life, landscapes, and still life arguably embodies the birth of modern art.

More recent iconographic scholarship has focused on ostensible disguised moral messages, whereas Svetlana Alpers has rejected such approaches as incongruously transferred from Italian history painting (or more pertinently Netherlandish religious themes) to secular scenes of everyday life, a debate that remains unresolved.

Exhibitions have paid increasing attention to the broad range of genre painting, and the unsurpassed popularity of Johannes Vermeer has provoked examination of his relation to his peers, including Carel Fabritius, Gerard Ter Borch, Pieter De Hooch, Gerrit Dou and Frans Van Mieris. The latter artists nevertheless remain poorly understood and lamentably under-researched.

This lecture course will trace the origins of genre in Netherlandish painting to its full flowering in the Dutch Golden Age, address the major debates about its interpretation, and attempt to formulate a coherent and convincing account of genre painting in all its diversity and its most powerful expression in Vermeer.

The gist of the course will reside in the intersection of nitty-gritty tasks of establishing the oeuvres of individual artists (connoisseurship, chronology) and their interaction (influence) and larger questions of aesthetics: the meaning and significance of genre painting. Auditors permitted.

Preliminary Readings:

Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983).

Required reading.

Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (London, 1952). A classic of Art History, should be read by all art historians, the best existing book on Vermeer.

Albert Blankert et al. Vermeer (New York, 1988). An easy read and good introduction to Vermeer scholarship. A newly revised edition appeared this year and should be ordered for GC Library.

Sutton, Peter. Masters of seventeenth century Dutch genre painting (New York, 1984). Familiarize yourself with the painters and their work

C L. 71000 - Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fasoli, [66301]

Of all the poets of the Late Renaissance, Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) is by far the one who enjoyed the most "productive" artistic and literary life outside his own oeuvre. He was the protagonist and subject of several works inspired by the legend of a life, torn as was between the longing for artistic perfection and social recognition, and the misery and dejection brought upon by a profound behavioral and mental malaise.

From Goldoni to Goethe, from Byron to Baudelaire, from Donizetti to Delacroix, artists and writers have been inspired, primarily, by the poet's seven year internment in the Sant'Anna hospital in Ferrara.

Clinical and psychoanalytic considerations aside, what still fascinates readers and scholars is the apparently irreconcilable fracture between Tasso's obsession with literary and religious orthodoxy and the irrepressible tendency toward muted infraction and transgression, as evidenced by most of his major works, from the pastoral drama Aminta (1573) to the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581), from the abundant lyrical production to the prose of the Dialogues (1578-94).

If Tasso's compulsive desire to comply with Church doctrine is an inevitable result of the cultural and political climate of the Counter-Reformation (and of the declining levels of patronage and protection of intellectuals in Italian courts), his fixation with issues of poetics and theory is emblematic of the late and post-Renaissance attitude towards the theoretical codification of all literary genres and practices.

Tasso redefines the epic code in opposition to Renaissance chivalric narratives (e.g. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso), adopting as theoretical bases Aristotle's Poetics, and traditional rhetoric. In doing so, the poet seems to lay down a set of binding rules and principles that he implicitly but constantly challenges or puts to test in his creative works, especially in the Jerusalem Delivered. The result is a body of work that enthralls us with its never-ending and labyrinthine series of contradictions and ambiguities.

In this course we will read, Tasso's major dramatic, poetic and narrative works, alongside his reflections on poetics (the Discourses on the Art of Poetry, 1579; the Apology of the Jerusalem Delivered, 1585; the Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 1594), and on the role and status of the "man of letters" in late 16^th century Italy (selections from the Dialogues).

The course ends with a survey of the "Quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso", an impassioned debate whose participants included not only literary theorists and critics, but also a "natural philosopher": Galileo Galilei.

Students can read the texts in the original Italian version. For those students not in the Italian specialization, English or French translations are available. 

For further information, please write to pfasoli@hunter.cuny.edu

ENGL. 81100 -Anti Semitism: Racism & Colonialism in Marlowe, Shakespeare & Behn GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Hayes, [66115]

We will begin with an examination of anti-Semitism in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
 

We will then discuss racism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Othello which will lead us to a discussion of colonialism and sexual difference in Shakespeare’s Tempest and in Behn’s Orooknoo.

We will try to decide whether these works are inherently anti-Semitic, racist, and colonialist. We will point out similarities and differences between anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and today and we will discuss how we might teach these works in undergraduate courses.

As a coda we will read Coetzee’s Foe.

ENGL. 82300 - Lyric/Polemic/Dramatic Milton GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Wittreich, [66117]

We will start with Justa Edovardo King naufrago (1638), the volume in which Lycidas first appears and which itself provides a pattern, a design for the 1645 Poems of Mr. John Milton and 1673 Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions, both of which, along with "Paradise Regain’d" . . . To which is added "Samson Agonistes" are at once illustrative of and paradigmatic for poetic volumes conceived not only as gatherings of poems but as themselves a poem.

Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to the publisher of Lyrical Ballads, the poems themselves are but the stanzas of an ode, which is the volume itself; or as Robert Frost quips, where there are twenty-five poems published together, the twenty sixth is the poetic volume.

Milton’s poetic volumes were the means by which some later poets conceptualized their poetic volumes and theorized their projects, much as critics would later do in a volume like Poems in Their Place, edited by Neil Fraistat, or in the many more recent discussions of the idea of the book, or in the on-going "Book" seminar (under the aegis of Peter Stallybrass) at the University of Pennsylvania.

Our initial concern will be with how poets contextualize their own poems through organization and placement--a concern that we will then pursue in terms of both Areopagitica and Of Education.

In the last third of the course, that we turn to other sorts of contextualizations for Milton’s poetry, especially biblical, as they inform both Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.

Indeed, Milton seems to invoke scriptural stories only to trangress them and then to encourage contextualizations different from those currently in fashion, thus not only (not even principally) Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Euripides and Seneca, along with the biblical tradition of tragedy as its is exemplified by the Book of Revelation or by Christ suffering, both of which Milton foregrounds through citation in his preface to Samson Agonistes.

Our largest concern will be with what new editions of Milton, with what a new Milton criticism, will look like in this twenty-first century and new millennium.

Required text:

Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2^nd edition. London and New York: Longman, 1997.

Seminar requirements:

(1) an oral presentation and (2) a final paper.

HIST. 78900 - Jews in Muslim&Christian Spain GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 noon, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gerber, [66230]

MUS. 86700 - Music & Words in the Renaissance GC: W, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Atlas/Hanning, [66392]

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).

SPAN. 71300 - La Celestina GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Di Camillo, [66056]

SPAN. 72300 - Don Quijote GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lerner, [66057]

Textual Problems, Critical Practices and the Modern Reception of the Cervantine Novel.

This course will focus on the transmission of the text of Cervantes= Don Quijote in the seventeenth century and in the twentieth century. The question of the relationship between the first and the second parts of the novel will be also examined, as well as the most important semantic and ideological aspects of the text.

To study problems of annotation, several modern editions will be analyzed, among them, the best known ones of M. de Riquer, J.J. Allen, L. Murillo, J.B. Avalle-Arce, V. Gaos, F. Sevilla-A. Rey Hazas and Francisco Rico.

Critical interpretations of the Quijote will be also considered so as to recast the history of its reception in the twentieth century.

SPAN. 82200 - Seminar: Spanish Literature of the Baroque GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Schwartz, [66062]

The Satires of Quevedo: Transmission, Sources and Reception.

This seminar will focus on the study of Quevedo’s satires in verse and prose, their circulation in manuscript in the early seventeenth century and the history of the first editions.

Quevedo’s satirical corpus will be also analyzed in relation to its literary models, which encompass Roman satura in hexameters, as practiced by Horace, Persius and Juvenal, and Menippean satire, as developed by Varro and Seneca; Lucian’s Greek satires, and their Renaissance recreations in works by Erasmus and Justus Lipsius. They will be also considered from the perspective of genre, and as particular realizations of the aesthetics of wit in the Baroque.

Texts to be studied in class will include Quevedo’s versions of Menippean satire: SueZos and La Fortuna con seso y la hora de todos, and a selection of satirical poems written in tercets, among them the "Epístola satírica y censoria" dedicated to the Count-Duke of Olivares, sonnets and romances which develop motifs and topoi also present in the prose satires. Editions to be used include those published by Cátedra and Castalia (1993), J.M. Blecua’s canonical edition of the poetry and the annotated anthology Un Heráclito cristiano, Canta sola a Lisi y otros poemas.

A bibliography of secondary sources will be distributed in class.