Studies in Renaissance Literature

This course will engage the intersection of a particular historical moment and a particular literary problem.  The moment is the so-called “late Renaissance,” and the literary problem is the question of genre.  The literary culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in Europe has been called “the age of criticism,” because of the proliferation of theoretical writing on poetics and rhetoric which emerged from the great generation of humanist-trained writers that flourished in the mid-1550s.  Central to the new culture of criticism was a sustained and complex reflection on literary genre, on the multiplicity of possible literary forms, on the ideological implications of different generic choices, and on the intersection of genres.  In this seminar we will focus on three virtually contemporaneous texts from three genres and national traditions—texts which have come to be understood as foundational to European literary modernity.  The texts are Montaigne’s Essays, Tasso’s epic of the First Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote.  We will be interested in how these texts provide a reflection on genre and in how they effectively swallow up and digest earlier forms in their invention of new types of narrative, new subjectivities, and new ways of imagining community. Reading knowledge of French, Italian, or Spanish is useful but not necessary.

Reading List:

Montaigne, Essays, trans. Frame (Stanford U.P.)

Montaigne, Essais, ed. Micha (Garnier-Flammarion), 3 vols.

Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Nash (Wayne State U. P.)

Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata (Garzanti)

Cervantes, Don Quixote (Penguin)

Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. Riquer (Juventud). 2 vols.