First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-24)

Topic

Modern Love in Contemp Lit and Film

Instructors

Samuel Aftel

Meeting Info

Shepard Hall B25: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Love is a central dilemma of the human experience--and literature and film. This course investigates love as a major theme and dilemma of some of the most influential novels and films in recent memory. We will pay particular attention to how race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and nationality impact people's ability to find love and people's very understanding of the concept. In that spirit, we will explore love across a diverse archive of texts, contemplating how love orients, and disorients, the norms of contemporary prose fiction and narrative filmmaking. This course will interrogate how love expands, bends, and complicates (predominately) American genre conventions and the social contexts that produce these conventions in the first place. We will think of love as both an agent of chaos and a source of profound existential significance in our literary and political imaginations. We will examine racism's effects on love and the broader complexities of interracial romance in James Baldwin's "Come Out the Wilderness" (1965). We will analyze the power of queer love in Annie Proulx's 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain" and Ang Lee's 2005 film adaptation. We will reflect on the line between friendship and love in the romcom classic When Harry Met Sally (1989), directed by Rob Reiner. And we will dissect the fraught nature of modern dating culture in Kristen Roupenian's viral "Cat Person" (2017). Hopefully, by the end of our time together, we will all gain a more complete sense of love's importance by developing the writing, reading, and analytical skills required to excavate love's meaning.

Class Attributes

WCAS Writing Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required