3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

What do we want from poems? What does literary criticism have to do with desire? How might we understand the relationship between literary critics and texts, authors, and characters as an ambivalent, fraught and complex space of attachment? Focusing on poetry, this course will read a sequence of early modern lyric poems and shorter narrative poems and a transhistorical array of critical writings in which the interpretation of poetry is brought into relation with other forms of attachment, cathexis, and longing. Authors and texts will include: Plato, “Phaedo”; Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love; Heather Love, “Emotional Rescue”; Sigmund Freud on sublimation; Sappho; Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet; Shakespeare’s sonnets; Oscar Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W.H.”; John Donne, Holy Sonnets; Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne; George Herbert ,”The Temple”; Aaron Kunin, Love Three; Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions; Keats’ Odes; Anahid Nersessian, Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse.