Pre- and Early Modern Literature - Fall 1998

A graduate seminar with focus on the close reading of the poetry of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374); examination of his construction of a "modern lyric subjectivity " and a poetics and an ideology of desire. We will examine theories of courtly love/debates about the origins of desire (Arabic, Provencal, Italian); the codification of "Petrarchism" as a cultural phenomenon; discussion of confession & autobiography; investigation of how the lyrics deploy the themes of the self, the other, gender, the erotic fetish; Pagan metamorphosis versus Christian conversion.

Course offered in English; bilingual texts.

• Petrarch, Canzoniere
  • Trionfi
  • Secretum
  • Familiares
• St. Augustine, Confessions
• Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Dante, Vita Nuova
• Shakespeare, Sonnets
• Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch
• Fineman, Joel, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (selected chapters)
• Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (selected chapters)
• Class reader with critical essays ( Lacan; Freud; Kristeva; John Freccero; Gianfranco Contini; Nancy Vickers; Robert Durling; Ann Rosalind Jones; Peter Stallybrass; Teodolinda Barolini; Tom Greene; Margaret Freguson; Giorgio Agamben).

Revised 7/19/04.