Love and Literature Ivy Nuling Huang
Course Description:
To give a proper description to the course, a proper definition of this course is needed. The title of this course “Love and Literature,” in fact, is like the title of many of the stories of Aesop’s Fables (ie. “The Rabbit and The Turtle,” “The Wolf and the Crane,” “The Fox and the Stork,” etc.) implies the conflicts and contradictories between ‘love’ and ‘literature.’ Many popular love stories in the world of literature are usually not looked upon as orthodox literature (Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, is usually regarded as not as serious and great as his other tragedies).
Surely we do have many literary works where the element of love is one of the dominant themes, but usually in there the love element is always put within the frame of something greater and more serious. So in this one-semester course of about 15-16 weeks, it is not likely to deal with something too big and too time-consuming like novels. And we are not going to cover poems or dramas either, since the former are usually considered as too condensed and baffling, and the latter, unfortunately, is not my major.
Instead, I select something easier to approach—short stories. But
please do not expect that the stories we study here are to be as light-hearted and consumptive as the so-called ‘romance,’ since, like the name of our course suggested, we are to see how love as a dominant theme are placed and displayed within the frame of literature. As can be expected, we are to see how love is played together with topics that we normally discussed in love relationship like ‘trust,’ ‘self-deception,’ ‘illusion and disillusion,’ ‘truth & lies,’ ‘test & temptation’ etc, etc… The order of the stories compiled in our handout is not based on the level of difficulty; rather, it is done chronologically and also according to the development of story-telling technique;
therefore, the first one is from the mythological time, and the last one is somewhat surrealistic, in between are those from the modern and even the post-modern era.
Requirements: 2 Oral Report for each group (Finish your report in10 min) 2 papers for each course taker
Grading: Oral Report---20 % Paper---25 % Final exam---45%
Attentiveness and response--10%
Text and Reference works:
All the short stories used in this course are collected either in the compiled works of the respective authors or in the anthology texts that we use in our texts for
American or English Literature.