Art and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Catalog description

In this course we will cover a selection of Classical, Medieval and Early Modern works from various linguistic traditions (English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), which feature literary representations of art, especially via scenes that are ekphrastic in nature (the description of Achilles’s shield in Homer’s Iliad, for instance), and via textual moments that use exemplary ekphrastic scenes as a point of departure for larger commentaries on: the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the reception of works of art along with their attendant sociocultural impact. Taking moments of renegotiation, critique, and resistance towards dominant hierarchies as a helpful framework, along with texts that explicitly situate themselves against the exemplary model from which they are drawing, we will give special attention to race and gender by examining the artistic representation of marginalized bodies that are explicitly gendered or racialized in the literary texts in which they appear. We will also look at race and gender in select works from Medieval and Early Modern artists.