Early Modern European Nations and Empire

NY UNIVERSITY
RSCP. 72100 -Early Modern Cultural Translations: City, Nation, Empire GC: M,
6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [92602] Cross listed with C L
80900 and ENGL 81100.
This course will focus on the various forms Renaissance and Early Modern culture has
taken in geographic space. It will concentrate on the translation of culture across borders
from the local to the national, the imperial, and the intercontinental.
We will draw on historical analysis to examine how cultural, literary, and visual forms
are transformed as they are absorbed in new locations and new political-geographical
formations. The central focus will be the processes by which cultural spaces are
imagined, projected, and crossed.
Our starting point will be current debates over the kinds of borders in which culture is
both produced and received; we begin with contemporary claims for the authenticity of
local communities and counter-claims for large cross-cultural geographic space; we will
consider how these claims bear upon debates concerning the "natural" locations of
Renaissance and Early Modern culture.
The locations of culture to which we will attend include the Italian city state (especially
Florence and Venice) and English, French, and Spanish nation states and transcontinental
empire.
The course culminates in the New World synthesis of European and indigenous cultural
forms that resulted from Early Modern trans-Atlantic exploration.
We will examine the historical conditions in which cities, states, and empires are
imagined and formed, the symbiotic and violent ways cultures appropriate each other,
and the forms in which those appropriations are artistically represented. Examples will be
drawn from the historical, literary and visual traditions, including case histories and the
theory of the state and empire; lyric, epic, travel narrative, and ethnographic description;
prints, drawings, architecture, and cartography.
Particular attention will be devoted to the relation of the formal qualities of works to their
geographical setting, especially where competing geographies and identity groups
intersect.
Emphasis will be placed on critical approaches and research problems as illustrated in
readings from political and cultural history, literary criticism, and art history as applied so
such figures as Dante, Petrarch, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, Columbus, Las Casas,
Oviedo, Garsilaso, Thevet, Léry, as well as the monuments of Venice and the major
English and Spanish cartographic projects in Europe and the New World.
Because this a cross-disciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material
drawn from their home discipline for discussion and assignments.