First-Year Writing Seminar: Love and Trouble

Semester and Year	FA 2010
Course Number	FIRST-UG345
Section	001
Instructor	Susan Weisser
Days	Mon,Wed
Time	9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Description

All you need is love, love makes the world go around, and love is a battlefield, so the songs tell us. What kinds of love are essential to our well-being, and why does love so often go wrong? This course will examine friendship, romance and marriage, and parenthood as forms of love that are very personal and yet have social rules of their own, sometimes unspoken. We will use a selection of philosophical, sociological and literary texts to see what they contribute to our understanding of how love and trouble sometimes go together. We will read selections from Aristotle on friendship, Dan Savage on parental love, Stephanie Koontz’s History of Marriage , and Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse ; literary texts include drama by Neil LaBute, memoir by Jamaica Kincaid, fiction by Jane Smiley and Yukio Mishima, and poetry by Anne Carson. Discussing what we think and feel about these representations of love will serve as the springboard for developing students’ writing on the subject. Students will compose descriptive and critical essays and workshop their writing in multiple drafts.

Course Type

First-Year Program: Writing Seminars (FIRST-UG)