Love in the Western World: What Happened?
Term:
Fall 2009
Subject Code:
GLIB
Course Number:
5533
In 1940, the French scholar Denis de Rougement published his monumental study
Love in the Western World, based on a detailed analysis of the Tristan myth. With this text as background, we will survey a wider terrain, starting with the ancient distinction between Eros and Agape, and surveying a variety of other different modes of love: passion, obsession, jealousy, destructiveness, suffering, transcendence. Among the readings will be
Hippolytus by Euripides: poetry by Catullus and Ovid; the letters of Abelard and Heloise; the myth of Tristan and Isolde; the mystical poetry of the Troubadours and of Mechthild of Magdeburg;
Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos;
Sufferings of Young Werther by Goethe;
Madame Bovary by Flaubert,
Lolita by Nabokov;
Couples by John Updike;
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez;
The Hours by Michael Cunnginham;
Atomized by Michel Houellebecq; and two films,
Brokeback Mountain and
Breaking the Waves.
< back
