This course covers poetry, drama, fiction, and film. That’s a lot. Our theme will be love—ideal, adulterous, romantic, erotic, marital, theistic—which, while not mutually exclusive, is also a lot. The goals will be to (1) examine the ways that the various forms engage the presentation of the experience; (2) discuss the texts in their own right; and (3) have the student emerge with some sense of the distinctiveness of literary forms, as well as ways of talking about literature as a whole. We will examine questions that the texts present, overtly or otherwise: is it better to be the lover or the beloved? What is the relation between love and other forms of passion? Hence our course title: “Love’s Forms.”

Texts are likely to include: a selection of short stories to get us off and running the first week; Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, poems by Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker, e.e. cummings, John Donne, Rita Dove, Robert Lowell, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Tony Kushner’s play and the film adaptation Angels in America (Part One: Millennium Approaches).

The class is discussion-based, with 5 two-page response papers—framed around the presentation of a question—due each week.