RLFR 210(S) Fantastic Spaces and Imaginary Places: Literary Text and Image in Late Medieval and Early Modern France
When Aristotle speaks of Homer's powers of language, he describes the Poet's skill as a dimension of energy and eye, the capacity to "represent everything as moving and living" and thus to be "graphic", to make the audience actually see things through words. Medieval and Renaissance French writers based their literary projects on these ancient theories of visualization and presentation. The result was a period of intense literary creativity that encompasses a kaleidoscope of issues converging both on poetics and painting as well as on concepts of architectural and landscape design. This capacity to imagine is at the heart of writing about travel, exploration, discovery, spatial and natural description, phantasmagoric quests, poetic "madness", and the contemplation of mind. The primary vehicle through which we will examine these issues is the literary text and its supporting manuscript illuminations and book illustrations: namely, selected texts from Guillaume de Lorris' and Jean de Meung's Roman de la Rose and the allegory of love, Guillaume Du Bellay's Antiquités de Rome and Regrets, François Rabelais's grotesque epic of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Pierre de Ronsard's sonnet cycles on love and nature (Les Amours). We will examine how these overarching literary issues intersect with parallel developments in the visual arts (Burgundy in the 15th century, the Myth of the Golden Age, The School of Fontainebleau, Clouet), ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, including the development of the château, landscape and garden design and its allegorical configurations. Conducted in French.
Format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: class participation, two 7-page papers, a midterm examination, and an oral presentation.
Prerequisites: French 109, 110, 111, or permission of instructor. Enrollment limit: 15 (expected 10). If overenrolled, preference given to French and Comparative Literature majors and those with compelling justification for admission.
Hour: NORTON