Love Triangles: From Chaucer to Challengers

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The commercial success of Challengers (2024) elevated love triangles to the center of cultural discourse. The trope of the love triangle, however, has a long and storied history in English literature. This course takes a sweeping tour of the literary love triangle, following it from Medieval romance to Shakespearean comedy, from the 19th century novel of manners to contemporary realist fiction, and from the distinguished mansions of New York socialites to the windy back alleys of New Rochelle. Traversing multiple literary media—verse, drama, novel, and film—this course traces the politics of gender, desire, and propriety that animate three-sided romances. Along the way, we’ll ask the following questions: how does literary romance both respond to and shape normative social values? How do love triangles in particular both conform to and push the limits of social norms? How do authors across time use their medium to represent love and loathing, desire and envy? What can studying romance teach us about the evolution (or stagnation) of gender politics? Finally, what (and how) can romance teach us about the societies that produced these literatures? Ultimately, this course seeks to understand what makes love triangles such an effective and enduring device in the literary imagination.