ENGL 5039 Seminar: Unrequited Love

In unrequited love, one confronts the limits of one's power to shape the world, discovers the radically alien nature of others' desires and minds. This course will explore the many complexities of that painful mismatch, and the ways its unresolved contradictions lead to large, intractable literary and aesthetic questions (of character, psychology, social embeddedness, ethics). Readings will include texts from many historical periods, fields, and genres--philosophy, psychoanalysis, novels, poems, opera, and film. Toward the end of the course we will focus especially on the consequences of unrequited love for the history of the novel. Fulfills pre-1900 and Seminar