Love's Reach: A Visual and Poetic History

Catalog description

This seminar explores love in its manifold expressions - erotic and parental, filial and friendly, queer and political - asking how each form illuminates, contests, and deepens the others. We extend our inquiry from love of persons to love of world and fate: Arendt's amor mundi and Nietzsche's amor fati, the difficult yes to existence as it is. Our materials move between philosophy, literature, and the visual arts: Plato's Symposium, Kierkegaard's Works of Love, Fromm's The Art of Loving, Weil and Murdoch on attention as love's discipline, Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts, Sophocles' Antigone and Ovid's Orpheus; the Song of Songs, Shakespeare's sonnets, Cavafy's poems of memory and the body; Morrison's Beloved, Baldwin on love and justice, Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton, Didion's Blue Nights, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Ocean Vuong; Rembrandt's Jewish Bride, Hine's Ellis Island portraits, Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Leibovitz's photographs of Sontag dying, Deana Lawson's tableaux of Black kinship and desire. At the heart of the seminar lies the cultivation of attention, care, resonance, dwelling, and seeing. Can love be commanded - as the v'ahavta insists ("You shall love"), as Buddhist metta is cultivated, as Sufi mahabba is practiced - or does command betray love's nature? How does love unsettle us, and how does it return us to ourselves?