Literature and Love: How do love stories shape us?
What do we talk about when we talk about love? In this course we’ll ask this question in various ways by taking a look at how a variety of texts approach questions of loving, and writing about love—different kinds of love—in different ways. If love is constituted, in part, by the language used to describe it, how does the language of love stories shape how we perceive and experience it? How do our love stories shape our expectations and experiences of love? How do the metaphors we use shape the way we think about love? What do our conventional love narratives suggest about gender, sexuality, and marriage? How do individual experiences of love deviate from these narratives–and why should we care? Is love merely personal, intense, private or is it also socially and politically useful? What does literature have to say about this?
This course introduces you to the skills and practices of literary criticism by inviting you, and equipping you, to interrogate details of language and form, and to pull together and analyze research sources in order to support sound and interesting arguments, i.e. to “read” these primary texts in new and deeper ways. You will be invited to ask rich and provocative questions about literary texts, find and analyze research sources and write good, clear arguments. Lively engagement is a basic requirement. You will be asked to write two close readings and a research paper in this course. Texts are likely to include short stories by Kim Fu, an essay about friendship by Ann Patchett, the film Rocks by Sarah Gavron, David Chariandy’s Brother, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love, as well as other contextual readings.