WGSS 53.05 The Poetry and Rhetoric of Love, from Petrarch to Social Media
What we call "love poetry" has generally been a way of expressing much more than the emotional and erotic fascination of one person with another. Often it seems to bypass the love-object altogether, and focuses instead on power relations or poetic achievement. Beginning with early examples, and moving on to contemporary and modern poems, our course will place love poems by men and women in the context of an ongoing poetic tradition, recent feminist criticism and theory, and talk about love and sex in recent popular culture. This last will include: excerpts from recent books about dating and seduction, film, contemporary song lyrics, dating websites, and campus culture.
Cross Listed Courses
ENGL 65.06