What Is Love?
GENED 1208
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
What is love, and what can art teach us about it that a psychologist or philosopher never could?
What is love? A union of souls? An emotion? An act of willing the good of the other? A bunch of chemicals in the brain? Can we choose whom we love? And what do we even mean when we utter the words — utterly generic and yet, in context, utterly singular — “I love you”? This course will introduce you to one history of answers to this question through great works of Western civilization.
Readings range historically from Sappho to bell hooks: philosophies from ancient Greek ethics (Plato, Aristotle) and theological accounts from late antiquity and the medieval period (Saint Augustine, the letters of Abelard & Héloïse) to modern psychoanalysis and Marxist as well as natural law-based theories; literature from canonical works (Petrarch, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Austen, & Woolf) to contemporary essays (Jia Tolentino, Amia Srinivasan); and aesthetic media from poetry, drama, and the novel to opera (Mozart) and film (Howard Hawks, Pedro Almódovar, Wong Kari-Wai).
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
NOTE: This course requires additional sections; you will be prompted to choose secondary components during the Add to Cart process
