Winter 2002
This information effective for Winter 2002.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Winter 2002
Instructor: Professor Margaret Brose
TTh 2:00–3:45 p.m.
Crown 105
“What’s love got to do with it?”
The course will focus on the Canzoniere, the collection (songbook) of love poetry written by Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) about his beloved Laura. Petrarca is the most influential love poet in the Western tradition, whose work was imitated through the Renaissance to today (“Petrarchism”), in many languages. In the poems of the Canzoniere, Petrarca codifies what we call “Romantic Love,” a set of attitudes towards passion that continues to influence contemporary culture. True love must be impossible, unrequited. The lover must be anxious, jealous, filled with paradoxical feelings (love and hate); caught in the ambivalence of desire and the desire “not to desire,” the duality of body and spirit.
The course will trace the origins of these ideas from earlier theories of love (Ovid; Arabic culture) to the courtly love poetry of the troubadours in Southern France (Provence). We will examine the transformation of these concepts and lyric forms into early Italian vernacular poetry (Dante, Cavalcanti, Guinizelli). We will read several influential letters by Petrarch (who is also know as the first Humanist) and his “confessions,” an ironic dialogue between himself and St. Augustine (the Secretum). In conclusion, the course examines Italian, French, and English Renaissance poets of “Petrarchism,” (Michelangelo, Lorenzo de’ Medici; the lyrics of female courtesans; Shakespeare sonnets).
Topics: confession and autobiography; the construction of subjectivity in poetry; the erotic fetish; Pagan metamorphosis and Christian conversion; Petrarchism as a cultural phenomenon of gender and class.
Requirements: faithful class attendance and active daily participation; several
informal oral presentations; several short papers. Students will be asked to
collect a “canzoniere” or songbook of contemporary lyrics about love.
Course taught in Italian. Texts in Italian (with a bilingual edition of the
Canzoniere available).