This course will cover a range of literary genres (poetry, drama, fiction) drawn from a range of historical periods that touch upon the theme of love.  The course is not intended to mark some historical trajectories of attitudes toward love, but to provide you with skills, skills you can use not only to analyze and write about literary texts, but also interpretative and argumentative skills that can be used in a wide variety of contexts and philosophical lens through which one can read literature and also re-examine a wide range of human experience.  In addition to reading literature, we will study literary critical approaches, reading examples of different kinds of literary criticism and modeling the critical methods in writing assignments, whether doing a “close reading” of a Metaphysical poem, putting a Shakespeare play into its New Historical cultural context or exploring reader-response to a contemporary YA romance novel.

Possible authors to be studied include: John Donne, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Henry James, Adrienne Rich, Mohsin Hamd, Nicola Yoon.