Fall 2011
RSCP. 72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies: Cultural Exchanges in the Renaissance GC:
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Schwartz, [15662] Cross listed with C L 71000
& SPAN 82000
This course will examine some Italian encounters with the ancient classics, which fostered the
invention of new literary forms and new literary voices, and their impact on sixteenth-century
French and Spanish literature.
It will focus on the shaping of this movement promoted by Petrarch, and on its development in
the following centuries with the works of Alberti, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus and
other famous humanists.
Special attention will be given to the function fulfilled by translators of texts written in Greek
into Latin, and of both Greek and Latin into the modern languages, who helped disseminate
philosophical theories and literary forms of expression after the invention of the printing press,
thus becoming mediators between classical and Renaissance authors.
Translation will be also considered in its propaedeutic function as a first step in the practice of
imitation, which ruled the composition of artistic works and constituted a main tenet of
Renaissance aesthetics.
New literary voices and cultural figures to be explored will encompass the Neoplatonic lover, the
humanist and the courtier; among new literary forms, Menippean satire, as composed after the
model of Lucian, which became very influential after the fifteenth century.
Readings will include poems by Petrarch, Ronsard, Garcilaso de la Vega and Herrera; Ficino's
Dell'amore; Alberti's Momus; Erasmus's Colloquies; Castiglione's Il cortegiano, and Cervantes's
exemplary novels.
RSCP. 83100 - The Clothing Culture of Early Modern Italy and England GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Profs. Fisher/Paulicelli, [15663] Cross listed with ENGL 82100, MALS
71200 & WSCP 81000
This course will examine the clothing culture of early modern Italy and England.
During this period, "fashion" was much broader than a simple notion of dress; it could refer to a
wide variety of things like behavior and manners, and even to national character and identity.
Thus, fashion became an important institution of modernity.
This course will investigate how and where fashion came to the fore, establishing itself as a
threat to morality and religious belief, and serving as a vehicle for gender, class and ethnic
definitions.
We will draw on a broad interdisciplinary framework and discuss sources from both the English
and Italian literary traditions (although all the reading will be in English).
We will examine texts from many different genres, including costume books, plays, poetry,
novellas, treatises, and satires. We will also be analyzing early modern visual and material
culture.
We will ultimately consider how dress (and other types of ornamentation that covered the body)
became a cause for concern for the Church and State. These institutions sought to regulate
individual vanity and any desire to transgress the accepted societal codes.
Lists of possible topics for discussion and readings available in the Certificate Programs Office
(Room 5110)
ART. 75000 - Cross-National Perspectives on 17th Century European Art GC: R, 9:30-11:30
a.m., Rm. 3421, 3 credits, Prof. Atkins, [16069] Course open to Art History students, permission
required for all others.
This course will study artists' travels throughout the long seventeenth century.
The list of those figures who studied and/or worked abroad includes many of the leading artists
of the period: Rubens, Van Dyck, Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Poussin, Claude, Inigo Jones,
Christopher Wren, Bernini, and Velázquez, among others.
We will explore what motivated artists to make such moves and why clients often privileged
foreigners over local painters, sculptors, and architects.
Other topics will include case studies of international art centers (Rome, Paris, London, Naples,
St. Petersburg), analysis of import and export markets, investigations of artists who voyaged to
locations outside Europe, and examination of those, like Rembrandt, who decided not to travel.
In total, this course will critique dominant national histories and historiographies by studying
many of the canonical achievements of the seventeenth century from transnational perspectives.
Requirements: Student assessment will be based on a short research paper, a final examination,
and weekly class participation.
5 Auditors allowed.
Preliminary Reading:
Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture. Prentice Hall, 2005.
ART. 76020 - International Rococco & Visual Material Culture GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm.
3421, 3 credits, Prof. Zanardi, [16071] Course open to Art History students, permission required
for all others.
This lecture course covers the Rococo, a stylistic period that flourished primarily in the
decorative arts and ornamental design during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Despite its familiar associations to France, the Rococo was an international phenomenon
manifested in a variety of media, including architecture, painting, sculpture, the decorative arts,
and fashion.
The Rococo generally foregrounded fluid, asymmetrical, and organic characteristics in its
ornamentation and design aesthetic, which we will evaluate using eighteenth-century and modern
critical sources.
In this course we will examine Rococo expressions in diverse media, especially as the decorative
arts and furniture were integral to overall artistic programs.
We shall consider examples from various locations, which parallel artists' travels throughout
Europe and abroad.
We shall address significant topics such as gender, politics, the 'exotic,' novel forms of
sociability, women's roles as patrons and subjects of rococo art, the Enlightenment, and the rise
of the art market and art dealer.
While the rococo has been devalued and genderized as "feminine" (in contrast to the supposedly
"masculine" style of neoclassicism), recent scholarship has taken a revisionist methodology and
interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of this period and its supposedly "feminine"
characteristics, including evaluating this period from a global perspective.
Requirements: Class participation, weekly readings, response papers, and a final examination.
Auditors with the advance permission of the instructor.
Preliminary Readings:
Thomas Crow, "Fêtes galantes and Fêtes publiques," in Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 45-75.
Melissa Hyde, "Rococo Redux: From the Style Moderne of the Eighteenth Century to Art
Nouveau," in Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008 (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum: 2008), 12-21.
ENGL. 71600 - Bodies, Passions, & Humors in Early Modern England GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Pollard, [15561] Cross listed with WSCP 81000.
This course will examine how writers imagined and represented bodies in early modern England.
Conceptually, bodies changed dramatically in the period: the longstanding humoral model,
inherited from the Greek physician Galen, was confronted with challenges from Vesalian
anatomy, Paracelsan pharmacy, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, and new
illnesses and medicines introduced by international travel and trade.
Amid all these changes, bodies on page and stage were dissected, dismembered, drugged,
displayed, disciplined, adorned, painted, and ravished.
We will examine how different genres represent these and other bodily states, with attention to
the body's relationship to the mind, the emotions, the environment, and literature itself.
Readings will include tragedies (probably including The Duchess of Malfi, The Revenger's
Tragedy, and Hamlet); comedies (probably including The Taming of the Shrew, Bartholomew
Fair, and Volpone); and erotic epyllia (including Venus and Adonis and The Metamorphosis of
Pigmalions Image); as well as selections from cookbooks and cosmetic manuals (such as Platt's
Delights for Ladies), antitheatrical polemics (including Gosson's School of Abuse), and medical
texts (such as Elyot's The Castle of Helth, and Crooke's Mikrocosmographia).
Assignments will include two presentations, several brief written responses, and a final paper.
ENGL. 81100 - Repression, Continuity, and Trauma: Early Modern Cultural Memory GC: M,
6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [15552]
We will begin with an introduction to cultural memory studies, with special focus on the
construction of a coherent personal and social present through retrieving the past.
We will focus primarily on two concepts: the dialectic of forgetting and remembering, repressing
and recovering in the formation of memory in the present; and the recovery of past events that
can either be integrated or resist integration into an historical narrative.
Using these concepts, we will explore the role of memory in the early modern period considered
as a time of uncertainty, ambivalence, and catastrophe, conditions that produced ambiguous
national and religious identity borders.
We will begin with the period's greatest anxiety-driven memory project, the recovery of Roman
antiquity. We will examine the deep ambivalence of the principal initiator of the project,
Petrarch, especially in his contemplation of ruins.
The course will then move to classical imitation in early modern England in the context of the
recovered and repressed memory of native Roman tyranny in Britain as well as other ethnic pasts
in Britain—Celtic, Gothic, and Norman.
The second half of the course will turn to the period's other major memory project, religious
memory.
We will focus on the role memory played in establishing legitimacy of Catholic and Protestant
reigns through narratives of victimhood and survivorship. We will consider how Catholics
remembered their own and the Protestant past, and how Protestants remembered their own and
Catholic past. We will end this half of the course by considering the construction of English
identity through memory of the scriptural and medieval Jewish past, including Jewish London.
The course will conclude with the period's iconic meditation on archaeology and the recovery of
the past, Thomas Browne's Urn Burial.
Readings will also include Petrarch's travel letters, Shakespeare, the poetry of Ben Jonson and
George Herbert, histories of England, Catholic and Protestant poetry and pamphlets, and
topographical description.
FREN. 87200 - Feast, Famine and Fast GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 4202.11, 2/4 credits, Prof.
Sautman, [16008] Cross listed with MSCP 80500. Course taught in English.
This interdisciplinary course draws on the materials, methods and issues of anthropology, literary
analysis, cultural and social history, and the study of visual cultures.
It addresses the many ways food--its production, exchange, ritualization and preparation-interfaced with other defining aspects of medieval cultures, such as political power, religious
practices, and the articulation of identities.
It focuses on the later Middle Ages (13th to early 15th centuries) but also covers some problems
of the early modern period (15th to early 17th).
The themes studied thus include, but are not limited to, asceticism, rejecting animal flesh,
carnival mythologies, the politics of banquets, the cult of hunting, wine in ritual and commodity
exchange, food, medicine and health regimens, all the way to the colonization of the "New
World" and the effects of transatlantic slavery and plantation economies on food practices and
identities.
While this not a literature course, there will be discussion of the uses of food as literary device
and symbol in major works of medieval literature such as Juan Ruiz de Hita's Libro de Buen
Amor, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Villon's Testaments.
As well, contemporary theoretical approaches to visual cultures will be applied to the
iconography of food, while the use of historical documents such as account books or regimens of
health will be given careful attention.
Some of the readings, both in medieval and early modern studies and in modern theory, include,
but are not limited to, work by Arjun Appadurai, Ann Astell, Carolyn Bynum, Joan Cadden,
Piero Camporesi, Carole Counihan, Carlo Ginzburg, Allen Grieco, Terence Scully, Timothy
Tomasik, and Allen Weiss.
HIST. 80000 - Literature of Latin American History I GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 5
credits, Prof. Bennett, [15732]
In recent years, some Latin Americanists have questioned the hermeneutics defining the field of
colonial Latin American History.
The colonial designation some feel posits a disjuncture (or beginning) when it could be argued
that continuity characterized the historical narrative. While students of ideas, political practice,
and the cultural domain have been the strongest proponents of this intervention, scholars of
indigenous cultures-especially the Nahua Studies groups-share similar sentiments despite
differences in scope and method.
Consequently, scholars have been utilizing terms like 'early' and 'early modem' Latin America to
distinguish their work from a colonial roject and its association with the rupture that Spanish
hegemony allegedly implied.
Concurrently, a self-conscious collection of scholars identified as the Latin American subaltern
studies group have called into question the elitist hegemony shaping the structure and content of
Latin American history.
Scholars of the Latin American subaltern along with those who take issue with the occidental
reasoning informing how Latin America history is currently conceived are introducing new
terminology (subaltern, postcolonial, Afro-Latin American) that allegedly re-frames the Latin
American past and present.
In our semester's work, we shall explore the meanings and implications, if any, that this and
other discursive shifts have had on Latin American historiography.
Even as this seminar attends to shifts in meaning and context, we will engage the substance of
the existing historiography.
Though designed for students in the Latin American field, the thematic and theoretical concerns
informing the assigned readings and the course itself make this seminar accessible and of interest
to early modem Europeanists, colonial Americanists, students of race, anthropology and cultural
formations along with those interested in the current state of early modem cultural theories.
Students registering for this seminar should, at their earliest convenience, contact the instructor
at [email protected] for a list of the preliminary (summer) readings.
SPAN. 87100 - Lyric Poetry/Colonial Criollismo GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits,
Prof. Chang-Rodriguez, [15922]