Introduction to Literatures and Cultures of the Romance World I: Medieval to Early Modern
This interdisciplinary course engages with the manifold literary productions of the Romance world from the 13th to the 18th century. We will explore various genres—including poems, travel narratives, essays, plays and performances—coming from or engaging with five continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America. As we will delve into these texts against the backdrop of visual and audio material produced during that period (maps, music, paintings, art and architecture), we will investigate topics such as global travel, colonization, the human body, selfhood, women’s rights, and the environment. While historicizing the fluid and yet complex categories of place, space, territory, border, race, class and gender, we will address an array of topics, themes and affects that move us today, including love, desire, indigeneity, cosmopolitanism and the manifold articulations of nature. We will also acknowledge the tension, raised in our texts, between colonial languages and non-European and/or indigenous languages. Authors include Luís de Camões, Dante, Olympe de Gouges, Sor Juana, Michel de Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Petrarch, Marco Polo, and Gaspara Stampa.
Required readings:
- Anonymous, The End of Atau Wallpa (ed. Jesús Lara), in Stages of Conflict. A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance, eds. Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 59-80.
- Luís de Camões, Selected Sonnets, ed. and trans. William Baer (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “First Dream,” in Selected Works, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Norton, 2015),
- ——, “Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” in Selected Works, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Norton, 2015).
- Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- Luís de Góngora y Argote, “Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea”/“The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea,” in Selected Poems, bilingual edition, trans. John Dent-Young (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 176-209.
- Olympe de Gouges, “Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen,” in Women in European Culture and Society: A Sourcebook, ed. Deborah Simonton (Abington: Routledge, 2015), 13-16.
- Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, trans. Anne Dunhill (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
- Giambattista Marino, Adonis, trans. Thomas E. Mussio (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019), Canto VII (The Delights), 217- 254.
- Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection (“On the Cannibals”), trans. M. A. Screech (New York et al.: Penguin Classics, 2004), 79-92.
- Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. Paul A. Chilton (2004)
- Petrarch: The Canzoniere, or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, trans. Mark Musa (Indiana University Press, 1999).
- Marco Polo, The Description of the World, trans. Sharon Kinoshita (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2016).
- Gaspara Stampa, The Compete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition, trans. Jane Tylus (Chicago: Chicago University Press, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, 2010).
- Molière, Don Juan, in Don Juan and Other Plays, trans. George Graveley and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31-91.
Prerequisites: No prerequisites
Language of instruction: English