[Past] 26 Boccaccio and Gender - Summer 2018
CLASS NUMBER:
770-96
INSTRUCTOR:
TIME:
Tuesdays, 6:00-9:00 pm
LOCATION:
TBD
DESCRIPTION:
Readers are always surprised by the modernity of Boccaccio’s stores of desire, deception, and delight: how can a fourteenth-century work speak so clearly to twenty-first century readers, especially on the topic of gender? This course investigates this question by exploring both Boccaccio’s narrative masterpiece, the Decameron, and his other works, including the first collection of women’s lives, On Famous Women. Examining critical debates about Boccaccio’s proto-feminism and the apparent misogyny of the Corbaccio, we will scrutinize how Boccaccio uses literature to create a new space for women and their wit as well as other models of desire. Our attention will focus on the Decameron, but we will also examine the distraught lover that narrates Europe’s first psychological novel, the Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta; the many nymphs that populate both the Ameto and the Nymphs of Fiesole; the lives of mythological and real women recounted in his Genealogies of the Gentile Gods and On Famous Women; and his manipulation of misogynistic discourse in the Corbaccio. Far from being a work of the past, Boccaccio suggests radical new paths forward.
Gender, History, Literature