English 250, section 1: Religion and Poetry in Early Modern England
Instructor: Professor David Marno
What does it mean to speak to God through a sonnet? Why would someone retell the story of the Biblical Fall in verse? Why rewrite the Psalms in rhyme royal? In this course, we’ll read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious poetry along with their source texts and contexts in order to answer such questions.
French C203: The Learned Academies of Early Modern France, Italy and Spain (1500-1800): Knowledge, Sociability, Politics
Instructor: Professor Déborah Blocker
This course investigates the literary, artistic and intellectual importance of the major learned academies of early modern France, Italy and Spain (1500-1800), with an eye to their social and political impact.
Political Science 212B: History of Political Thought: Topics in Renaissance and Early Modern Thought
Instructor: Professor Shannon Stimson
The purpose of the seminar is to examine selected writings of crucial thinkers in the history of Renaissance and Early Modern Political Thought (Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume and Marx). Secondary writings accompanying each thinker will assist us in considering some of the contextual and interpretive issues of relevance to these thinkers, and in considering such problems as: counsel, authority, sovereignty, tyranny, subjection, oaths, obedience, religious toleration, forms of political participation, sociability and civil government, justice, equality, and revolution.
Italian Studies 215: The early modern ‘public sphere’: controlling and selling knowledge in the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’
Instructor: Professor Diego Pirillo
Since its first appearance in 1962, Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has had a wide influence on several fields and disciplines from the humanities to the social sciences. Translated into English in 1992, it has been further discussed and reappraised, opening new directions of research also with regard to the early modern period.
Spanish 285: Resonating Spaces of the Early Modern: Pastiche, Parody, Imitatio.
Instructor: Professor Emilie Bergmann
An exploration of the changing conceptualization of intertextual relationships, from Garcilaso’s Petrarchist poetics to dramatist Octavio Solís and novelist Giannina Braschi’s postmodern versions of Calderón’s La vida es sueño. Among the stops between: ekphrasis (verbal imitation of a work of visual art); the voices of pícaros from Lazarillo to Cabeza de Vaca and Cervantes; operas, novels, and music inspired by Sor Juana’s poetry; Carpentier and the architecture of the neo-Baroque. Critical readings will include recent work by Luis Avilés, Noelia Cirigliano, and Mar Martínez-Góngora on early modern space.
Most readings will be excerpts on bSpace.
Spanish 280: The Spanish Colonies: Improper Laboratories of Modernity
Instructor: Professor Ivonne Del Valle
In this course we will read Spanish texts (written by Spaniards or under the direction of Spaniards) dealing with problems arising in the colonies in the 16th century around several related issues: what constituted just war and a just enemy, when was violence excessive, how to turn enormous populations speaking multiple languages into good Christian subjects and (especially)into good laborers, how to write about a nature that seemed to contradict current scientific ideas?
English 246E: Restoration and Early 18th Century
Instructor: Professor James Grantham Turner
An exploration of the satire, devotional autobiography, prose fiction, letter-writing, diaries, heroic verse, drama, pornography and feminist polemic produced in England between the Restoration of Charles II (1660) and circa 1735; these will include Behn’s Oroonoko, the world best-seller Robinson Crusoe, the earlier works of Pope (Rape of the Lock), selected letters of Mary Wortley Montagu describing her life in Turkey, and major writings by Swift (Tale of a Tub, Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels).