THE HISTORY OF LOVE

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Lower-Level

What is love? This team-taught course in Classical Studies and English explores answers to this question in the history of love poetry, with a focus on ancient Greece and Rome and early modern English literature. It examines how love shapes the concerns and forms of poetry, and how poetry shapes the experience of love. The course looks at how different authors in different periods treat a wide range of subjects related to love, including eroticism, seduction, sex and sexuality, gender, marriage, infidelity, and age and aging. It identifies modes of thought and expression particular to specific periods and poetic genres, while also investigating shared ideas, forms, and figurative language across literary history. Authors include Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Behn, among others. The course will also look at treatments of love in contemporary poetry that draw on and vary material from the relevant traditions: of central interest here will be works by women, LGBTQ+ authors, and Black poets. All readings are in English. This course will count for Distribution in Humanities, and for the majors in Classical Studies and English. Cross-list: ENGL 254 .