NEW FALL ’07
GRAD COURSE
Professor Timothy Reiss, Distinguished Scholar
in Residence and Professor Emeritus
G29.2155, G45.2155, G57.2154, G95.2966.002
Topics in Early Modern Written Culture: Toward Rethinking
the Renaissance:
Metaphor, Creation, and Subversion
This 4 point
graduate course will meet 2 weeks in Fall’07 and 2
weeks in Spring ’08:
October 1-12 Tues/Thurs
12:30-3:15 (public lecture: evening of Oct 1)
April 7-18 Mond/Thurs 11-1:45 (date of public lecture TBA)
The seminar’s
four credits will accrue over two semesters, with students registering in the
fall and receiving grades at the completion of the spring session. (There will be no spring registration for
this course.)
This seminar is an experiment. The instructor will try to
trace the establishment and meaning of “Renaissance” by following the fortunes
of a metaphor over several hundred years. In the metaphor of “bird islands” he
sees made visible the complexities and anxieties of half a millennium of
usually-violent cross-cultural intersections, gradually clarified, perhaps
never quite understood. This metaphor began to acquire a potential for these
meanings in the twelfth century and reached full complexity in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. This presupposes, too, analysis and discussion of the
meaning(s) of “metaphor.” Tracing this particular metaphor will let us study a panoply of events, agents and dilemmas thought by
historians to define a “European” Renaissance. These in fact compose a history
that is Muslim from the Levant to far
The events include, vitally but not exclusively: trade
and dynastic movements from the eleventh century; establishment and expansion
of Islam, religious imperialism, Crusade and sacramental claim; colonial
expansion and settlement (also from about the eleventh century); Mediterranean,
West African, Atlantic and Indian-Ocean voyaging, from the eleventh to the
sixteenth century. Their agents range from Islamic rulers and thinkers to
Christian Crusaders; Venetian, Genoese, Iberian and other mariners and
merchants to African dynasts and artists; Arab thinkers and writers across the dar al-Islam to western Mediterranean
explorers; Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors and missionaries to Nahua and Tupi fighters and
artists. Among the dilemmas are those of otherness, identity and personhood;
ideas of society and barbarism; vernaculars of language, experience and
understanding; “tasks” and place of history and poetry; nature of experience; aporias of mediation and expression; aesthetic and
political anxieties....
The initial guiding element for the seminar will be the
instructor’s metaphor. It will be studied in writers starting with Columbus,
Las Casas and Zurara, going
back to Arab sources and on to Petrarch, Boccaccio and others in the 14th-15th
centuries, to Vespucci, Gonneville, Cartier, Thevet, Léry and others in the
16th (a preliminary bibliography will be made available before the seminar’s
start). Seminar participants will not be expected to echo the instructor’s
trajectory, but to take off from these events and agents in order to explore
whatever dilemmas and whomever of those caught in them are of particular
interest to the participant’s own researches.
The seminar’s four credits will accrue over two
semesters, with students registering in the fall and receiving grades at the
completion of the spring session. (There
will be no spring registration for this course.) The instructor will be
present in