S1105 Writing Venice: Italy, Aesthetic Theory, and the Novel from Ruskin to Proust

This course will explore some of the ways that their perceptions of Italian culture—and particularly of Venice—shaped the aesthetic theory and practice of non-Italian writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will therefore begin with some important accounts in British nineteenth-century aesthetics—in particular, John Ruskin\'s The Stones of Venice and Walter Pater\'s The Renaissance—examining, at once, their understanding of Italian art and culture and the ways that that understanding, shaped, in turn, their (contrasting) theories of aesthetic experience and the place of art. Among many other questions, Ruskin\'s text might lead students to think about the effect on thought of a particular place—and the particular place in which they happen to be living—and about how Ruskin\'s articulations of a perception of place and his theory of aesthetic spectatorship mutually inform one another. Pater\'s text asks, among other things, what it means for a culture to be reborn—what the discovery of classical culture meant for Italian culture of the Renaissance and what, in turn, the Renaissance and its art could mean for a nineteenth-century viewer. Pater\'s beautiful text presents a paradoxical theory of cultural transmission; the continuity of human thought—what one might call humanism—is ensured by a series of gaps and vanishings: art remains a source of vital interest because it allows one to perceive the perpetual vanishing away of life and of the artifacts of human passion. Venice—in many ways a \"spectral\" city—is an ideal setting in which to think about Pater\'s understanding of cultural transmission and of what it means to perceive a work of art.
Turning then to fictional texts set in Italy (again, with a particular emphasis on Venice), the aesthetic theories of Ruskin and Pater will frame a series of questions that can grouped in two categories: the role of \"setting\" in the novel, and the question of literary and cultural transmission. We will begin with Henry James, with essays from the Italian Hours about Venice and moving to \"The Aspern Papers,\" a short, perplexing tale about literary transmission; that baffling narrative invokes the transmission not only of particular texts (in the story, a poet\'s love letters) but of Italian culture by way of the British cult of the Romantic Poet. Turning then to one of James\'s masterpieces, The Wings of the Dove, we might ask, among many other questions, why the culmination of its narrative occurs in Venice; the setting again leads one to question—as does the famous scene where Milly perceives her mortality by gazing at a painting—the relation of the perception of art to its highly Paterian narrative (and to its particular narrative style). The course will conclude with the sections about Venice in Proust\'s In Search of Lost Time ; Proust\'s writing on Ruskin—his prefaces to translations of Ruskin\'s work—might help to contexualize the aesthetic theory that Proust took (and adapted) from Ruskin. Read in the context of Ruskin and Pater, and of the questions raised by the course, \"Venice\"—as it appears in these short selections from In Search of Lost Time—offers a way to beginning thinking about some of the crucial aesthetic and literary questions animating Proust\'s great novel.\r\n

Learning Outcomes: The course description sets out the conceptual and literary historical material that I hope, as an outcome of the course, students will come to know better. I also hope that students will come to read literary texts in more attentive and sophisticated ways: paying attention to the details they encounter, for instance, and also pondering the possibilities (and limits) of moving between aesthetic and fictional texts. I hope that they will consider, that is, not only the role of Venice in the formation of a certain tradition of aesthetics, and not only the influence of that tradition on certain literary texts, but also the specificities of literary form—what it can and cannot take from, how it might be said to shape, the concerns of aesthetics.

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Teaching and Evaluation Methods:
While, when it seems necessary, I will provide students with background information about the writers we address, the course will be based on discussion. Depending on the make-up of the class, I might ask students to give very short presentations introducing the material on particular days; otherwise, evaluation will be based on writing: a short paper at mid-term and a longer final paper at the end of the course.

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Required Preliminary Knowledge:
None