Love: A Cultural History

Catalog description

This is a course about the cultural history of love. We will focus on romantic love, with an emphasis on how ideas about love have been a dynamic part of our social, political and economic world. Some of the questions to be addressed include: How, historically, did the idea of love become coupled with freedom? How did romantic love come to be considered the epitome of self-fulfillment and what are the problems with that idea? How has the idea of romantic love been mobilized on behalf of things like the state, the nation, capitalism or revolution? How do types of love function as a measure of belonging or deviance? How does the discourse of love enter different kinds of institutional arrangements, such as marriage or state citizenship? As a way to explore these questions, this course looks primarily to literature, including fiction, poetry, and drama, but also to philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology and law. Students will immerse themselves in an interdisciplinary range of material as they read, discuss and write about these representations. We will roam through cultural theory of affect, psychoanalytic notions of love, historical constructions of marriage, and feminist discussions of love and sexuality. Prerequisites: 76-101 or 76-102 or ( 76-106 and 76-107 ) or ( 76-107 and 76-108 ) or ( 76-106 and 76-108 )