English BC 3159 
The English Colloquium on 

C. H. Plotkin

   the Renaissance  

401 B Barnard Hall

§ III “Reason and Imagination”

x4-2101

Fall term, 2007

cplotkin@barnard.columbia.edu

I

Introduction

II

Plato: Phaedrus; Symposium      [Coursepack: "Renaissance and Humanism: The New Education"]
Petrarch: "A Self-Portrait"; “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux”
Pico della Mirandola: “Oration on the Dignity of Man”

III

Erasmus: Praise of Folly
Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel

IV

Castiglione: The Courtier       [Coursepack: "Castiglione's The Courtier: The Self as a Work of Art"]
Spenser, “A Letter of the Author’s Expounding the Whole Intention in the Course of this Work” (scil., The Faerie Queene) [handout]
Shakespeare, Sonnets

V

Vives: “A Fable about Man”
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

VI

Thomas More, Utopia 
Shakespeare, The Tempest

VII

Machiavelli, The Prince       [Coursepack: "Machiavelli: The New Ethics and Politics"]

Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great

VIII

Shakespeare, Henry V
Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus      [Coursepack: from The Overreacher]

IX

Montaigne, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond”
Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

X

Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox
Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy; The Changeling

XI

John Donne and Seventeenth-century poetry

XII

Milton, Paradise Lost

XIII

Paradise Lost (cont’d).

Concluding remarks: circles, lines, tangents