EUROPEAN 701

Special Topic: Culture of Emotions: Making European Identity

Please note: this is archived course information from 2012 for EUROPEAN 701.

Description

Focuses on the formation of European identity through the study of the culture of emotions (16^th-18^th century). Informed by major contributions by Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Richard Sennett, it gives an account of the progressive emergence and the changing visual culture of expression on human faces in European literature, philosophy, painting, rhetoric, and treatises on civility, conversation, medicine and physiognomy.

Availability 2012

Semester 2

Lecturer(s)

Lecturer(s) Professor Jean-Jacques Courtine

Reading/Texts

Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process, 1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

Elias, Norbert. The Court Society, 1939 (New York : Pantheon, 1983).

Erasmus. On Good Manners for Boys, 1530 (Collected Works, vol. 25, Toronto: Toronto UP, 1985).

Foucault, Michel. Madness & Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965).

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977).

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism, 1920 (New York: Scribner, 1958)

Recommended Reading

Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: the European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995).

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier, 1527 (London : J. M. Dent & Sons, 1944).

Corbin, Alain. The Foul & the Fragrant: Odor & the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986).

Della Casa, Giovanni. Galateo, 1558 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958).

Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul, 1649 (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub Co, 1989).

France, Peter. Politeness & Its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).

Gracian, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom: a Pocket Manual, 1658 (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

Outram, Dorinda. The Body & the French Revolution: Sex, Class & Political Culture (New Haven : Yale UP, 1989).

Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomy , 1775-8 (London: T. Tegg, 1844).

Le Brun, Charles. A Method to Learn to Design the Passions, 1696 (Los Angeles: The Clark Library, 1980)

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man (New York, Knopf, 1976).

Vigarello, Georges. Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

Assessment

2 essays: one 2500-word essay, worth 40%; one 3,500-word essay, worth 60% (total 6,000 words)

Points

EUROPEAN 701: 15 points