Daniel Carranza
Gen Ed 1208 | Newly approved
What is love, and what as well as how can art, broadly conceived, teach us about it that a psychologist or philosopher could not?
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 and Aristotle) and theologically inflected accounts from late antiquity and the medieval period (Saint Augustine and the letters of Abelard & Héloïse) to modern psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and Marxist as well as natural law-based theories; literature from canonical works (Goethe, Shakespeare, Austen, & Woolf) to contemporary fiction (J.M. Coetzee and Junot Diaz); and aesthetic media from poetry, drama, and the novel to opera (Mozart) and film (Wong Kar-Wai and Pedro Almódovar).