Painted Blind: Modern Tales of Madness and Love

Semester and Year	SP 2008
Course Number	K20.1467
Section	001
Instructor
Days	Mon
Time	3:30 PM - 6:10 PM
Units	2.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Notes/Restrictions

first seven weeks

Description

While the ancients blamed mad love on potions and sorcery or the nature of love itself, modern writers associate inappropriate love with medical, psychological, and social causes.  Sigmund Freud’s writing epitomizes this point, as does that of one of his severest critics, Michel Foucault.  Is love today a sickness or the last trace of a human will to elude institutional power?  From Austen’s comic romance Sense and Sensibility, in which desire wages a quietly eternal war against decorum, to Truffaut’s  historical dramatic film The Story of Adele H, in which the maddest of unrequited-love stories plays out as a full-fledged revolution of one against all authority, modern storytellers continue to demonstrate that narrative remains an important source of enlightenment for those who would understand the relations of love, consciousness, and power.  Readings will include selected essays by Freud on love and sexuality;  Foucault’s History of Sexuality;  one or more of the following novels:  Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility;  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, and Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin;  one or both of these films: Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve and Francois Truffaut, The Story of Adele H.

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)