When Aristotle speaks of Homer's powers of language, he describes the Poet's
skill as a function 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 ecstasy, and the contemplation of mind. The
primary vehicle through which we will examine these issues is the literary text:
namely, 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 the giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Pierre de Ronsard's sonnet cycles on
love and nature (Les Amours), and Michel de Montaigne's Essais and the
spatialization of mind. We will examine how these overarching literary issues
intersect with parallel developments in the visual arts (Burgundy of the 15th
century, The School of Fontainebleau, Clouet), ecclesiastical and domestic
architecture, including the development of the château, landscape design and its
allegorical configurations, and the discovery of the New World. Conducted in
French.
Format: seminar. Requirements: class participation, three five-page papers, a
midterm examination, and an oral presentation.
Prerequisites: French 109, 110, 111, or permission of instructor. Enrollment
limit: 15 (expected: 10). Preference given to French and Comparative Literature
majors.