What Do We Mean When We Say Renaissance?

(4 Credits)

This course interrogates the concept of “Renaissance” by examining its roots in 18th- and 19th-century historiography and its continued use in contemporary discourse as a metaphor for cultural rebirth, innovation, and transformation. Through the interdisciplinary lenses of comparative literature, history, art history, and philosophy, students will analyze how writers have constructed, mythologized, and repurposed the idea of “renaissance” to define the present in relation to the past. What do we mean when we say “Renaissance”? What does the term reveal? And what might it obscure? Weekly assignments and discussions will ask students to analyze both recent critical essays and primary source material from the past millennium. No previous coursework is required--only a healthy curiosity about how humans conceive of time and the narratives that they inevitably attach to it.