If the Renaissance is famous for discovering unknown continents and ancient texts, the body too was a new territory of conquest. How did literature respond to the rise of an anatomical gaze in the arts and in medicine, and how did it stage the aesthetic, religious, philosophical and moral issues related to such a promotion, or deconstruction, of the body? Does literature aim at representing the body, or does it use it instead as a ubiquitous signifier for intellectual, emotional and political ideas?
The locus of desire, pleasure and disease, the body also functions as a reminder of human mortality and is caught in the web of gender issues.
The class will use a new website designed specifically for the course, with a collective blog, private e-diary, an archive of 16th century images and texts, and a creative interface where students have the option to publish online essays or multimedia projects.
Texts from prose fiction (Rabelais), poetry (Scève, Ronsard, Labé, D’Aubigné), essays (Montaigne) and emblem literature. Extra documents include music scores, tapestries, paintings, blazons, and anatomical plates from medical books.