Baroque and Classicism

The presentation of the controversial concept of »baroque« and the complex relation between Renaissance and baroque. The course centres on crucial baroque authors in different national literatures: Tasso and Marino in Italy, Góngora and Calderón de la Barca in Spain, De Viau, Saint-Amant and Malherbe in France, Grimmelshausen and Opitz in Germany, Donne and Milton in England, Van den Vondl in Holand, Komensky in Chechia, Gundulić in Croatia, Svetokriški and Valvasor in Slovenia. The main authors of the French Classicism (Madame de La Fayette, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau) are presented in their sharp criticism of the baroque poetics which, nevertleless, maintains the conceptual basis of the Cartesian division between the material and spiritual world. The course shows that the source of the contemporary »unhappy« consciousness of the European culture is not Renaissance, which was based on the »happy« synthesis of the sensual and the spiritual, but baroque and classicism, which have tragically separated these two »substances«.