ENGL 110
American Love Stories Fall 2015
Division I Writing Skills
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Class Details

It’s been argued that American writers don’t know how to tell a happy love story. Instead of ending a tale with the payoff of a wedding, or writing about the joys of family life, they obsess over loneliness, death, and escape from civilization. In this class, we will collectively test and revamp that thesis, deliberately switching up the data set that constitutes “the American love story.” By the end, after encountering more than a century’s worth of imagined passions and attachments, you’ll develop your own working theory of the love story as a genre. Some of the big questions we’ll pursue are: How do these authors try to convey the nature of desire through their writing style? What makes an object of desire so desirable, and what forms does that desire take? How powerful a force is love supposed to be—what is it imagined capable of doing, and what are its limits? The texts with which we’ll construct some answers will likely include some familiar favorites (The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby) as well as some lesser-known gems (Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, Maria Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?), a smattering of poetry (including work by that great American lover, Walt Whitman), and recent film (like Spike Jonze’s Her).
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1983
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: 3 or 4 essays, totaling about 20 pages
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level English course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills

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