230623 Love: The Poetics and Politics of a Feeling (S) (WiSe 2009/2010)

Arguably the most long-lived of all literary topics, love has come in various guises in British literature over the centuries. Yet in spite of what would appear to be an excess of treatments, the set of emotions and experiences we call 'love' still remains a complex and exciting, frequently puzzling, and often enough frustrating, phenomenon. It does not seem to be the case that the more we read and hear about love, the more we understand love in ourselves or in others. In this seminar, we will explore the ways in which (British) literature and film have contributed to the shaping of concepts of love, how these concepts have changed over time, and to what extent love may, after all, not be a spontaneous and all-conquering expression of the individual soul, but a social construction that follows the implicit laws and structures of the discourses of a society. We will enquire whether there is a theory of love, and we will concentrate on three historical epochs in which the cultural expressions of discourse of love took particular shapes.
Please note that the reading load for this seminar is considerable. However, students will be allowed to choose a set number of texts from the following list of texts – i.e. participants will need to read most, but not all of these texts (details to be announced in the first session):
Early Modern love poetry (poems will be provided in a reader in the first session)
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818),
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1898)
E.M. Forster, Maurice (1914/1970)
A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998)
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion (2005)