Seminar syllabus - Aby Warburg
Christopher Wood
Fall 2013: Graduate seminar: Aby Warburg
Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an art historian who worked outside the academic establishment, building a prodigious private library and research center that mapped a new field of study: the persistence of the ancient pagan world into modernity, conceived as an ongoing psychic event. Exposed to what he experienced as a relentless barrage of expressive images of passion—“pathos formulas”—mediating archaic trauma, Warburg sought but could not find relief in the promise of aesthetic sublimation. The seminar will pose one central question which bears on the larger problems of communication (between subjects, between past and present) under the conditions of modernity: is Warburg’s pathos formula best understood as an image, a symbol, a symptom, a metaphor, a talisman, an avatar, a memory, or a packet of psychic energy?
His person, his library (which was transported from Hamburg to London in 1933 and survives intact), and his gnomic writings serve as a crossroads where many paths of thought meet, throughout the twentieth century and into our own. The seminar will relocate Warburg among the thinkers who shaped him, including Darwin, Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Usener; relate him to the art history of his day as practiced by Schlosser, Riegl, Wölfflin, Schmarsow, and Panofsky; coordinate his thought with the biological sciences, early anthropology, the study of archaic ritual and religion, the spheres of modern ornament, design, and dance, the emergence of the technological media including cinema, and the Husserlian “crisis of the sciences”; and finally consider his reception by Cassirer, Benjamin, Gombrich, Ginzburg, Agamben, and Didi-Huberman.
September 9: Introduction
September 16: Warburg in Florence
"Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera" (1893)
"The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589" (1895)
"The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie" (1902)
“Flemish Art and Florentine Early Renaissance” (1902)
"Dürer and Italian Antiquity" (1905)
“Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to his Sons” (1907)
"Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries" (1907)
These are among the most significant writings on Warburg; start reading these and let them accompany your reading throughout the semester:
Carlo Ginzburg, 1966
Ernst Gombrich, 1970
Giorgio Agamben, 1975
Kurt Forster, 1976 and 1999
Silvia Ferretti, 1984
Werner Hofmann et al., 1980
Horst Bredekamp et al., 1990
Philippe-Alain Michaud, 1999
Georges Didi-Huberman, 2002
Ulrich Raulff, 2003
Christopher D. Johnson, 2012
Spyros Papapetros, 2012
September 23: Warburg and the stars
"Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara" (1912)
“Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920)
Franz Boll, Sphaera: Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, 1903
September 30: Warburg in the Southwest
"Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America" (1923, publ. 1988)
“A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2, 1939
Joseph Leo Koerner, 2012
Michaud, 1999, chaps. 1 and 5
October 7: Florence 1900
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), “The Imaginative Art of the Renaissance,” 1895
Adolf von Hildebrandt, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, 1901
Arnold Boecklin, works; texts on him
Bernd Roeck, 2001
(October 14, Fall recess)
October 21: Biology 1900
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872
F. T. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 1887
Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza, 1879 (transl. into German, 1880; English, 1885)
Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens, 1905 (Engl. transl. 1921)
October 28: Philology, myth, science
Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza, 1879 (transl. into German, 1880; English, 1885)
H. Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der Religiösen Begriffsbildung, 1896
with reference as well to:
F. T. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 1887
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872
November 11: Kulturwissenschaft
* TERM PAPER PROPOSALS DUE *
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860
Edward Burnett Tylor, The Origins of Culture, 1871, chaps. 1-4
Karl Lamprecht, Initial-Ornamentik des VIII-XIII. Jhs., 1882; Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, 1909
Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos – Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, 1925 (transl. as Language and Myth, 1946)
also:
Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal 25, 2002
Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 1969
Giorgio Agamben, "Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in G.A., Potentialities, 1999) (= A.W. e la scienza senza nome," Settanta, juillet-septembre 1975; reprinted with an afterword in: aut aut, 199-200, 1984, pp. 51-66, 1975)
November 18: The literary Renaissance
Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Florenzer Tagebuch (1898)
Vernon Lee, “Marsyas in Florence” (1900)
Thomas Mann, “Gladius Dei” (1902)
November 25: Melancholia
Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928
Erwin Panofsky, on Dürer’s Melencolia I, from Albrecht Dürer, 1943
Wolfgang Kemp, "Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft, Teil 2," Kritische Berichte 3, 1975, 5-25
December 2: The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Gombrich, A. W., pp. 283-307
Kurt Forster and Katia Mazzucco, Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all’Atlante dell Memoria, 2002
Matthew Rampley, "Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas," in A. Coles, ed., The Optic of WB, 1999, 94-117
Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2010 ; id., Atlas, ou le gai savoir inquiet, 2011
Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, 2012, chap. 1
Sigrid Weigel, “Epistemology of Wandering, Images Re-vues, hors-série 4 (2013)
The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne has a considerable internet presence. See for example:
http://warburg.library.cornell.edu/ (site created by Christopher Johnson)
and
http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/atlante/
December 9 and 11: Presentations of term paper topics
TERM PAPER due Friday, December 20
REVISED SYLLABUS
October 28: Philology, myth, science
Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza, 1879 (transl. into German, 1880; English, 1885)
H. Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der Religiösen Begriffsbildung, 1896
with reference as well to:
F. T. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 1887
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872
November 11: Kulturwissenschaft
* TERM PAPER PROPOSALS DUE *
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860
Edward Burnett Tylor, The Origins of Culture, 1871, chaps. 1-4
Karl Lamprecht, Initial-Ornamentik des VIII-XIII. Jhs., 1882; Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, 1909
Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos – Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, 1925 (transl. as Language and Myth, 1946)
also:
Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal 25, 2002
Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 1969
Giorgio Agamben, "Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in G.A., Potentialities, 1999) (= A.W. e la scienza senza nome," Settanta, juillet-septembre 1975; reprinted with an afterword in: aut aut, 199-200, 1984, pp. 51-66, 1975)
November 18: The literary Renaissance
Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Florenzer Tagebuch (1898)
Vernon Lee, “Marsyas in Florence” (1900)
Thomas Mann, “Gladius Dei” (1902)
November 25: Melancholia
Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928
Erwin Panofsky, on Dürer’s Melencolia I, from Albrecht Dürer, 1943
Wolfgang Kemp, "Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft, Teil 2," Kritische Berichte 3, 1975, 5-25
December 2: The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Gombrich, A. W., pp. 283-307
Kurt Forster and Katia Mazzucco, Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all’Atlante dell Memoria, 2002
Matthew Rampley, "Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas," in A. Coles, ed., The Optic of WB, 1999, 94-117
Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2010 ; id., Atlas, ou le gai savoir inquiet, 2011
Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, 2012, chap. 1
Sigrid Weigel, “Epistemology of Wandering, Images Re-vues, hors-série 4 (2013)
The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne has a considerable internet presence. See for example:
http://warburg.library.cornell.edu/ (site created by Christopher Johnson)
and
http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/atlante/
December 9 and 11: Presentations of term paper topics
TERM PAPER due Friday, December 20
Fall 2013: Graduate seminar: Aby Warburg
Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an art historian who worked outside the academic establishment, building a prodigious private library and research center that mapped a new field of study: the persistence of the ancient pagan world into modernity, conceived as an ongoing psychic event. Exposed to what he experienced as a relentless barrage of expressive images of passion—“pathos formulas”—mediating archaic trauma, Warburg sought but could not find relief in the promise of aesthetic sublimation. The seminar will pose one central question which bears on the larger problems of communication (between subjects, between past and present) under the conditions of modernity: is Warburg’s pathos formula best understood as an image, a symbol, a symptom, a metaphor, a talisman, an avatar, a memory, or a packet of psychic energy?
His person, his library (which was transported from Hamburg to London in 1933 and survives intact), and his gnomic writings serve as a crossroads where many paths of thought meet, throughout the twentieth century and into our own. The seminar will relocate Warburg among the thinkers who shaped him, including Darwin, Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Usener; relate him to the art history of his day as practiced by Schlosser, Riegl, Wölfflin, Schmarsow, and Panofsky; coordinate his thought with the biological sciences, early anthropology, the study of archaic ritual and religion, the spheres of modern ornament, design, and dance, the emergence of the technological media including cinema, and the Husserlian “crisis of the sciences”; and finally consider his reception by Cassirer, Benjamin, Gombrich, Ginzburg, Agamben, and Didi-Huberman.
September 9: Introduction
September 16: Warburg in Florence
"Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera" (1893)
"The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589" (1895)
"The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie" (1902)
“Flemish Art and Florentine Early Renaissance” (1902)
"Dürer and Italian Antiquity" (1905)
“Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to his Sons” (1907)
"Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries" (1907)
These are among the most significant writings on Warburg; start reading these and let them accompany your reading throughout the semester:
Carlo Ginzburg, 1966
Ernst Gombrich, 1970
Giorgio Agamben, 1975
Kurt Forster, 1976 and 1999
Silvia Ferretti, 1984
Werner Hofmann et al., 1980
Horst Bredekamp et al., 1990
Philippe-Alain Michaud, 1999
Georges Didi-Huberman, 2002
Ulrich Raulff, 2003
Christopher D. Johnson, 2012
Spyros Papapetros, 2012
September 23: Warburg and the stars
"Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara" (1912)
“Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920)
Franz Boll, Sphaera: Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, 1903
September 30: Warburg in the Southwest
"Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America" (1923, publ. 1988)
“A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2, 1939
Joseph Leo Koerner, 2012
Michaud, 1999, chaps. 1 and 5
October 7: Florence 1900
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), “The Imaginative Art of the Renaissance,” 1895
Adolf von Hildebrandt, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, 1901
Arnold Boecklin, works; texts on him
Bernd Roeck, 2001
(October 14, Fall recess)
October 21: Biology 1900
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872
F. T. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 1887
Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza, 1879 (transl. into German, 1880; English, 1885)
Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens, 1905 (Engl. transl. 1921)
October 28: Philology, myth, science
Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza, 1879 (transl. into German, 1880; English, 1885)
H. Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der Religiösen Begriffsbildung, 1896
with reference as well to:
F. T. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 1887
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872
November 11: Kulturwissenschaft
* TERM PAPER PROPOSALS DUE *
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860
Edward Burnett Tylor, The Origins of Culture, 1871, chaps. 1-4
Karl Lamprecht, Initial-Ornamentik des VIII-XIII. Jhs., 1882; Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, 1909
Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos – Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, 1925 (transl. as Language and Myth, 1946)
also:
Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal 25, 2002
Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 1969
Giorgio Agamben, "Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in G.A., Potentialities, 1999) (= A.W. e la scienza senza nome," Settanta, juillet-septembre 1975; reprinted with an afterword in: aut aut, 199-200, 1984, pp. 51-66, 1975)
November 18: The literary Renaissance
Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Florenzer Tagebuch (1898)
Vernon Lee, “Marsyas in Florence” (1900)
Thomas Mann, “Gladius Dei” (1902)
November 25: Melancholia
Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928
Erwin Panofsky, on Dürer’s Melencolia I, from Albrecht Dürer, 1943
Wolfgang Kemp, "Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft, Teil 2," Kritische Berichte 3, 1975, 5-25
December 2: The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Gombrich, A. W., pp. 283-307
Kurt Forster and Katia Mazzucco, Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all’Atlante dell Memoria, 2002
Matthew Rampley, "Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas," in A. Coles, ed., The Optic of WB, 1999, 94-117
Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2010 ; id., Atlas, ou le gai savoir inquiet, 2011
Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, 2012, chap. 1
Sigrid Weigel, “Epistemology of Wandering, Images Re-vues, hors-série 4 (2013)
The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne has a considerable internet presence. See for example:
http://warburg.library.cornell.edu/ (site created by Christopher Johnson)
and
http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/atlante/
December 9 and 11: Presentations of term paper topics
TERM PAPER due Friday, December 20
REVISED SYLLABUS
October 28: Philology, myth, science
Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza, 1879 (transl. into German, 1880; English, 1885)
H. Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der Religiösen Begriffsbildung, 1896
with reference as well to:
F. T. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 1887
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872
November 11: Kulturwissenschaft
* TERM PAPER PROPOSALS DUE *
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860
Edward Burnett Tylor, The Origins of Culture, 1871, chaps. 1-4
Karl Lamprecht, Initial-Ornamentik des VIII-XIII. Jhs., 1882; Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, 1909
Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos – Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, 1925 (transl. as Language and Myth, 1946)
also:
Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal 25, 2002
Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 1969
Giorgio Agamben, "Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in G.A., Potentialities, 1999) (= A.W. e la scienza senza nome," Settanta, juillet-septembre 1975; reprinted with an afterword in: aut aut, 199-200, 1984, pp. 51-66, 1975)
November 18: The literary Renaissance
Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Florenzer Tagebuch (1898)
Vernon Lee, “Marsyas in Florence” (1900)
Thomas Mann, “Gladius Dei” (1902)
November 25: Melancholia
Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928
Erwin Panofsky, on Dürer’s Melencolia I, from Albrecht Dürer, 1943
Wolfgang Kemp, "Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft, Teil 2," Kritische Berichte 3, 1975, 5-25
December 2: The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Gombrich, A. W., pp. 283-307
Kurt Forster and Katia Mazzucco, Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all’Atlante dell Memoria, 2002
Matthew Rampley, "Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas," in A. Coles, ed., The Optic of WB, 1999, 94-117
Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2010 ; id., Atlas, ou le gai savoir inquiet, 2011
Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, 2012, chap. 1
Sigrid Weigel, “Epistemology of Wandering, Images Re-vues, hors-série 4 (2013)
The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne has a considerable internet presence. See for example:
http://warburg.library.cornell.edu/ (site created by Christopher Johnson)
and
http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/atlante/
December 9 and 11: Presentations of term paper topics
TERM PAPER due Friday, December 20
étoilesdes
(New York City, United States)
Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind cannot bear very much reality.
热门话题 · · · · · · ( 去话题广场 )
- 收集春天的季节性快乐时刻 731.0万次浏览
- 春天的影像诗 新话题 · 1.7万次浏览
- 译者生存实录 248次浏览
- 我在春天的随手读 1608次浏览
- 留在老家工作后的生活 27.8万次浏览
- 哪些时刻让你命悬一线? 4.7万次浏览