Topic: Utopias in Early Modern Europe
| Time | Days | Location | Instructor | GER | Credit | OPUS Class Number | Syllabus (Tentative) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4:30pm-6:30pm | Tu | Callaway Center S104 | Tschopp, Silvia. | HSCW. | 4 | 2979 | TBA. |
Content: The 16th century is marked by Early Modern Colonialism, more precisely the discovery of a New World on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and above all dramatical transformations wrought by political, economic, social, scientific and religious modernization. These experiences generated a new genre of writings - the utopias. The course focuses on the learned utopias that are seen as the prototypes of this new genre - Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602) and Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619) - but discusses also popular imaginings of an Earthly Paradise. These include the tradition of the Cockaigne and the mental world of Menocchio as reconstructed by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg in his famous book The Cheese and the Worms.
Required Texts: Ideal Commonwealths (More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis, Campanella's City of the Sun, Harrington's Oceana). Dedalus edition: 1988; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. John Hopkins University Press: 1980; Johannes Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis. Translated by Edward H. Thompson. Kluwer Academic Publishers: 1999
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