CMLT 120 - Love and Sexuality in Literature: The Western Tradition

Love is the answer; but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. - Woody Allen The emotion of love, the drive of sex: what is their relationship and how has culture constructed them? Must they go together? Is one necessarily better than the other? Do modern ideas of gender complicate or illuminate their relationship? In this course, we will investigate the literary, artistic, and musical manifestations of these two powerful forces from the Bible through contemporary times. Beginning with Genesis, we’ll read Plato’s Symposium and some of Sappho’s poems, look at two surprisingly progressive medieval texts (The Letters of Abelard and Heloise and The Romance of Silence), examine some of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, and enjoy Eliza Heywood’s seventeenth-century tale of Fantomina. As we move into the modern era, we’ll use various theoretical ideas (Freud, Foucault, Lacan) to understand literary texts such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” (along with Beethoven’s work of the same name), and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. We’ll end the course with the film Jules et Jim, some episodes of Sex and the City, and our own selection of poems about love and/or sexuality. (Group III)