Reading World Literature (201-0-1)
Topic
Love Scripts: From Sappho to Taylor Swift
Instructors
Marianne I Hopman
847/491-8361
Kresge Hall 4361
Office Hours: Tu/Th from 3:30-4:30pm
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-335: Tues, Thurs 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
Love Scripts: from Sappho to Taylor Swift
Romantic love, although a personal and intimate experience, unfolds amid social norms that guide or regulate many of its aspects, from the identification of a desirable partner to expectations about the outcome of the relationship. The "scripts" to be studied in this course refer both to the material traces of love songs transmitted from antiquity to the present on papyri, calf skin, or medieval manuscripts, and to the social protocols implied in and through those texts. As we read poems originating from ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome—including homoerotic poems sung at drinking parties and sophisticated love elegies addressed to mysterious and probably fictional addressees—we will draw on the resources of literary analysis to explore the narratives and poetic images through which love has been reimagined over time; we will historicize social constructions of the interplay of love, sex, and reproduction; and we will analyze the rhetorical construction of erotic bodies and partners' roles.
Class Materials (Required)
Bing, P. and R. Cohen, eds. 1991. Games of Venus: An Anthology of Greek and Roman Erotic Verse from Sappho to Ovid. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415902618.
Gill, C., ed. and transl. 2003. Plato: The Symposium. New York: Penguin. ISBN 9780140449273.
Bloch, C. and A. Bloch, transl. 2006. The Song of Songs: The World's First Great Love Poem. Translated with an Introduction and Commentary. New York: The Modern Library. ISBN 9780812976205.
Class Attributes
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area