GRK 382 Love's Song: A Poetic Philosophic History

In this course, we will trace one historic trajectory of what we, today, call "love," from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, and shall do so through a careful examination of the literature that sought to give expression to this ever-changeable and always-provocative concept: the songs of Sappho, the dialogues of Plato, the erotic manuals of Ovid, the gospels of Christianity, the troubled confessions of Augustine, the courtly tales of knights in the Middle Ages, and the great all-encompassing journey of Dante through heaven, hell and purgatory in the Divine Comedy. Significant attention will be paid to the way each of these works continues to contribute to our own modern expressions and notions of love, in all their ecstatic, heartbreaking, inspiring, and frustrating complexity.