SPRING 2001
This information effective for Spring 2001.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes..
Instructor: Carla Freccero
E-mail: freccero@cats.ucsc.edu
Spring 2001
This course will focus on early modern colonial encounters - both real and imagined - between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or what is also known as the Renaissance. While many courses have as their focus the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the New World, and numerous studies focus on the English colonial ventures in North America, this course seeks primarily to explore documents of early modern New World encounters that do not fit neatly into the category of colonialism or conquest. That is, we will include a study of France, which did not successfully colonize the portions of South America in which it maintained outposts, with the goal of producing a more ideologically nuanced articulation of this moment in the history of western Europe.
Through a study of fictional and historical texts, the course aims to produce a genealogy of the western European "encounter" with the New World that does not foreclose the possibility of alternative futures by a retrospective reading that sees conquest and genocide as the exclusive outcomes of the encounter. In part, this will involve a psychoanalytic as well as historical approach to the texts in question, an approach that seeks to read the conflicting and contradictory desires and identifications mobilized within European accounts of encounters with human alterity. A second focus of the course is the way in which many modern intellectuals accord overdetermined significance to this period in European history; the European "encounter" with the New World thus comes to symbolize, for modernity, both a beginning of sorts and an end and reinstates the Renaissance as a pivotal point in a history of modern western European ideological hegemony.
Students will have the opportunity, if they wish, to focus their research on geographic areas other than those studied in the course. Students will be evaluated on the following basis: 1) a critical historical research project on some aspect of European/New World relations, delivered as an in-class presentation with bibliography; 2) short response papers on secondary reading material; 3) a final paper of 10-15 pages, with 2 options: either a write-up of the historical research, or a sustained critical analysis/reading of a primary text. Attendance and participation will also be evaluated.
Week 1
History and Ideology of the encounter; debates, discussions, history
and myth
Explanation of terms used
Week 2
Columbus; Las Casas
1492: Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, England
Famous Voyages
Todorov, The Conquest of America; Jacques Attali,
1492
Week 3
Voyages, continued
Théodore de Bry, America
France in the 16th century
Georges van den Abbeele on de Bry et al.
Week 4
Pigafetta, The First Voyage around the World
Lestringant, Cannibals
Week 5
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil
André Thevet, Universal Cosmography
Week 6
Secondary critical material on Léry and Thevet (Lestringant,
de Certeau)
Montaigne, Essays
Secondary material on Montaigne (de Certeau, Freccero, Derrida,
Lestringant)
Week 7
France in Canada
The Protestant Mission
English voyages
NZ Davis, Women on the Margins; Jonathan Goldberg,
Sodometries
Week 8
English voyages, continued
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters
Week 9
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History; Heterologies
Latin American New World Critics (Retamar and beyond)
Peter Hulme et al., eds., Cannibalism and the Colonial World
Guest lecture (maybe): Hugh Raffles
Student presentations
Week 10
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship
Latin American New World Critics, continued
Guest lecture (maybe): Norma Klahn
Student Presentations