| Theme Courses | Theme Events | Theme Links |
Explored this year are ways the visual in the early modern period contests or complements the printed word; figures nationality, class, and gender; negotiates public and private spaces; occupies the space of theatricality; and participates in the marketplace of texts. Also considered are ways modern visual media, such as film or the internet, engage early modern visual media, such as the stage or the broadsheet woodcut.
Six Center courses participate in the early modern visual culture theme. The Center courses seize opportunities to promote a dialogue between these classes as well as with complementary classes offered in Art History. A Fall colloquium on the visual features Professor Stephen Orgel (Department of English, Stanford University) and Professor Joseph Roach (Department of English, Yale University). The year's course investigations conclude with a Spring undergraduate/graduate student conference headed by keynote speaker, Professor Alexander Nemerov (History of Art and American Studies, Yale University).
Early Modern Visual Culture Courses
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ENGL165 Early Modern Ballad Art, 1500-1800 (Undergraduate) This course will study the evolution of the broadside ballad during a crucial phase of its history, when it was disseminated for the first time in massive numbers, due to the rise of cheap print, and became an especially occasional form. The course will emphasize the particular formal features of the ballad, which, for the lower orders, was quite literally "art," pasted on the walls of their homes and alehouses. The course will culminate with each student converting an EEBO ballad into modern type, editing that ballad, and having it mounted on the EMC's site. |
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ENGL231 Visualizing Shakespeare on Film and Stage (Graduate) The goal of the course is to examine Shakespeare's plays in relation both to early modern visual culture and to modern film versions. A usual week's assignment will consist of one Shakespeare play, one film version, and one important theoretical essay. Theoretical pieces will for the most part be "classics" such as Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" or Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Plays will probably include Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Love's Labors Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. There will be three options for taking the seminar: 1) research course, 2) reading course, 3) audit. Those taking the seminar as a research course will write a 15-20 page research paper on a topic related to the course material. Those taking the seminar as a reading course will write a term paper (8-10 pp.) and will also write a take-home final exam. All members of the seminar will present several brief reports during the term. |
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ENGL235 American Enlightenment in Print and Visual Culture (Graduate) |
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ENGL197 Visualizing Shakespeare's Plays (Undergraduate) |
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ENGL197 Drama as a Visual Art (Undergraduate) The course, part of the year-long Visual Culture theme of the Early Modern Center, will consider drama as a visual art. The sixteenth-century saw a crisis in the status of the image unprecedented in Western Europe. The religious culture of Europe in the fifteenth and early decades of the sixteenth century was intensely visual, expressing itself in the visual art we associate with the Renaissance. But the Protestant Reformation attacked this art as idolatrous and unleashed a wave of iconoclasm across Northern Europe, including England. What were the consequences of this crisis for the drama of Elizabethan England? As a visual art, theater was also subject to attack. Acknowledging that theater is indeed a visual as well as a verbal art, we'll study the ways in which the visual and theater were assailed, then read plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and others that respond to this crisis in the status of the visual. |
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ENGL197 Early Modern Visual Culture (Undergraduate) This course would contribute to the EMC's theme for next year. It would involve a study of the relation between the verbal and the visual through a survey of changing modes of self-representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and art. Visual representations will include: formal portraits, emblems, ballad images, miniatures, architecture, perspective painting, and family portraits. Literary representations will include: Shakespeare's Richard II, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, ballads, Jonson's masques, sonnets, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Some collaboration is expected with Ann Jensen Adams, in Art History, on the topic of formal portraits. |
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ENGL231 Early Modern Visual Culture (Graduate) This will be a graduate version of the undergraduate course that will require more substantive reading of primary and critical texts. |
Early Modern Visual Culture Events
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GRAD/UNDERGRAD CONFERENCE: VISUAL CULTURE 9:30 - 5:00 pm., HSSB1173. End of year conference bringing together faculty and students from EMC theme courses on Early Modern Visual Culture. Keynote Lecture: "Raphaelle Peale's 'Blackberries': Imagination, Embodiment, and the Refusal of Selfhood," Professor Alex Nemerov, Department of Art History and American Studies, Yale University Conference Schedule: 9:00 Coffee and Pastries 9:30 Introduction, Patricia Fumerton, Director of Early Modern Center, “Launching Visual Culture” 9:45 Presentations by Students of English 197: “Poetry of Ecstasy,” and English 102: “English and American Literature, 1650-1789,” Professor Robert Erickson: Jessica Audino, Hannah Curcio, Sarah Lyle, Kern McPherson, and Katie Omweg 10:30 Presentations by Students of English 231: “Visualizing Shakespeare,” Professor Mark Rose: Colin Carman, Brook Cosby, Stephen Deng, Amber Godey, and Alex McKee 10:45 Break 11:00 Presentations by Students of English 197 and 231: “Early Modern Visual Culture,” Professor Patricia Fumerton: (Undergraduates) Rebecca Chapman, Therese Clementi, Aja Davis, Patricia Tarango, Lauran Wiesenhutter (Graduate Students) Stephen Deng, Tassie Gnaidy, and Andreas Zachrau 12:00 Lunch 1:15 Awards Ceremony: Graduates of the Undergraduate Specialization in Early Modern Studies 1:30 Keynote Address, “Raphaelle Peale’s ‘Blackberries’: Imagination, Embodiment, and the Refusal of Selfhood,” Professor Alex Nemerov, Department of Art History and American Studies, Yale University 2:30 Break 2:45 Presentations by Students of English 235: “American Enlightenment,” Professor Elisa Tamarkin: Stephen Sohn, Colin Carman, Mike Benveniste, Mary Ma, Rob Wallace, Amber Godey, Carina Evans 3:15 Presentations by Students of Art History 257A: “Vision, Knowledge and the Scientific Revolution,” Professor Ann Jensen Adams: Amy Buono, Emma Cryer, Sarah Haight, April Haynes, Steven Kendall, Charlie Peterson, Katharina Pilaski, Angela Sagues, Kelly Turner 4:00 Roundtable Discussion: Ann Jensen Adams (Art History), Lee Bliss(English), Patricia Fumerton (English), Michael O’Connell (English), Alex Nemerov, Elisa Tamarkin (English) Mark Rose (English) |
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Kevin Sharpe, "Recovering the Renaissance Reader" 4:00 p.m., Seminar Room, 2417 South Hall |
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Leah Marcus Seminar 3:00 pm., EMC. Leah S. Marcus, Department of English, Vanderbilt University. Seminar on the writings of Elizabeth I. |
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Leah Marcus Lecture 3:00 pm. Seminar Room. Lecture by Leah S. Marcus, Department of English, Vanderbilt University. Title: "Reading Elizabeth Writing: The Text as Visual Artifact" |
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Don Foster Lecture Don Foster is a Professor of English at Vassar, as well as a UCSB graduate. Well-respected as a literary "sleuth," Professor Foster is now working on the anthrax letters sent to public officials earlier this year. |
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Linda Seidel Lecture 3:00-6:30pm, State St. Room. Lecture by Linda Seidel, Department of Art History, University of Chicago. "Pain and its Antidote in Fifteenth-Century Painting" (co-sponsored with Medieval Studies) |
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EARLY MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: VISUALIZING THE STAGE Stephen Orgel, Department of English, Stanford University "Shylock's Tribe" Joseph Roach, Department of English and Art History, Yale University, Panel Discussion: Ann Bermingham, Robert Hamm, Mark Rose, Stephen Orgel,
and Joseph Roach |