An Age of Sensuality: The Baroque

The major baroque literary works from the English, Spanish, and Italian traditions will be studied; in addition, we will discuss music and analyze slides and prints of paintings and architecture from seventeenth-century Europe.

This course, as an interdisciplinary approach to the baroque tradition, will provide students with alternative ways of seeing and appreciating the literature, art, and some music of the Seventeenth Century, a period of tremendous tension and sense of impending apocalypse. The student learns that the greatest aesthetic expressions of optimism, spirituality, and potentiality of humankind most often occur in times of crisis. Such was the baroque, a period that saw the Thirty-Years War, Counter-Reformation, and English Civil War. The age was filled with great intellectual ferment as well, with perceived threats to religion posed by the scientific inquiry of Copernicus, Keppler, and Newton, and Descartes' philosophic methodology. A student of the humanities sees that techniques of artistry are often based upon similar impulses, which give rise to similar, though variously articulated, mediums of artistic eloquence.

As an upper-division course, this class will synthesize different disciplines within the humanities, drawing upon, principally, the literature and visual art of the baroque period, but relying upon music, history, philosophy, and science, as well. By means of different perspectives, this course will offer an overall appreciation for comparable works of artistic expression.

Week One: Introduction to course, including historical background, scientific ferment, qualities of
baroque visual art (Caravaggio), baroque poetical style (conceit, extended metaphor); dramatic
themes (theatrum mundi); tension between sexual and spiritual, the ephemeral and the physical.

Week Two: Criticism of the concept of the baroque: can it be defined, or only known by a sum of its
parts? (a discussion of Wolfflin's views). Introduction to the English baroque: John Donne (works:
"The Good Morrow," "The Sun Rising," "The Canonization," A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning").

Week Three: Donne continued: use of irony, imagery, paradox
          (works: a generous selection of poems, including "Woman's
           Constancy," "Go and Catch," "The Flea," "Going to Bed,"
           "The Extasie."

Week Four: Donne concluded: Thematic and metaphorical link
       between love and death, sexual love and religious ecstasy (among the works to be
       studied: "The Funeral," "Air and Angels," Holy Sonnets, "Good Friday.") The art of
        Holbein: the technique of Anamorphosis.

Week Five: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (theatrum mundi, tedium vitae, female
perfidy).

Week Six: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra concluded, begin Hamlet (Shakespeare as
baroque playwright, mixed metaphors, anamorphosic design (radical perspective).

[Note: Corneille's El Cid may be substituted on the syllabus for one of the Shakespeare plays]

Week Eight: The Spiritual and Physical: poetry of Herbert and Marvell (among the works to be studied: Marvell's "The Nymph
Complaining," "To His Coy Mistress," "The Mower"; Herbert's "The Altar," "Easter Wings," "The Pulley," "The Collar").

Poetry of Crashaw and Vaughan: religious poetry and ecstasy (among the works to be studied: Crashaw's "The Weeper," "The
Flaming Heart," "In the Holy Nativity," Vaughan's "The Retreate," "The World," "The Waterfall," "They Are Gone Into the World
of Light").

Week Nine: Introduction to Milton: fusion of classical and religious, felix culpa, irony, metaphysical imagery (work: Paradise Lost, bk.
1).

Week Ten: Milton continued: Satan as hero: the romantic view, Christ as epic hero, the poem as drama (bks. 2-12).

Week Eleven: The Spanish Baroque (Inquisition, illusory nature of physical reality: theatrum mundi, religious and mystical literature,
"Dark Night of the Soul," selections from St. Theresa's The Mansion of the Soul; St. John's "Living Flame of Love," "The Dark
Night," "Spiritual Canticle").

Week Twelve: Calderon de la Barca: theatrum mundi, drama as moral instruction (work:
Life Is A Dream).

Week Thirteen: Art of Velazquez; Art of Italian Baroque: Caravaggio, Bernini,
Michelangelo. Architecture and visual art.

Week Fourteen: Italian baroque cont. The music of Vivaldi, and the "belatedness" of
music as artistic expression. The French Baroque: restraint; art of Poussin;
devotional poetry; art of Georges LaTour.

Besides reading the primary materials, an analytical paper will be required on one of the works discussed in the course as it pertains to the concept of the "baroque" (explicate a poem or compare a poem to a painting, for example; papers will become an integral part of the class, with early drafts circulated in class in order to encourage and to facilitate the interdisciplinary approach to the course. Students will also be asked individually to make an oral presentation on a work not covered in the syllabus, a painting, poem, or drama that typifies the qualities of the baroque. As well, group projects will be required that merge students' efforts, where students share Diego Velázquez. Juan de Pareja.

thematic/structural material in an interdisciplinary effort presented before the class. (These projects may be of a more creative nature--emulating a baroque style in original poetry, art, or music, for instance, or whatever joint creative exercise that a group chooses--and may be substituted for the more usual presentation. I have found that while students often find creative efforts far more daunting than first envisioned, the effort is an extremely effective teaching exercise, even if eventually abandoned for the more conventional paper.)

The poetry of Crashaw, Herbert, Marvell, and Vaughan (to be photocopied by instructor, or available
in Seventeenth-Century Verse & Prose, White, Wallerstein, and Quintana).

The poetry of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa (to be photocopied by
instructor)

Additional material for reports, papers, etc.: Rene Wellek, "The Concept of the Baroque," the poets Fray
Luis de Leon, Gongora, Quevedo, Marino, D' Aubigne, Jean de Sponde, the artists Reubens, Rembrandt, Murillo, Claude. The
music of Antonio Vivaldi, J. S. Bach.