Love as Illness in the Med and Lit Trad

Catalog description

This course will trace the conception of unfulfilled love as an illness in medical and literary thought from antiquity through the early 20th century, exploring how lovesickness was diagnosed and treated in different medical paradigms throughout history and how the lovesickness theme was deployed in literary texts to uncover and interrogate a variety of psychological, social, and medical issues. Ideally, the course would be interdisciplinary, incorporating texts from the medical, philosophical, and literary disciplines, and spanning a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. This selection of texts will allow us to address, among others, the following questions: what notions of illness and health does the lovesickness paradigm uncover? How is the relationship between the body and the psyche elaborated in these texts? Do genre and gender influence the way love is conceived and enacted?