In the Mood for Love: Cultural Discourses on Love

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In order to examine how love is both a source and an effect of culture, the topic will be studied from a theoretical perspective, but also within specific works of art, literary texts, music, and films. The concept of love will be situated in different cultural contexts, historical periods and artistic movements. Our goal will be to understand how the history of aesthetics and the history of emotions have been conditioned by gender, sexuality, religion, and racial constraints. For this reason, the course contents follow a thematic structure rather than a chronological one, and are divided into fifteen types of discourses on love, which will be approached from a transdisciplinary and transhistorical perspective in order to see what has changed and what remains the same from one epoch to another, as well as what is different and what is similar from one cultural or artistic context to another.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

 At the end of this course the students:

● Will be able to understand and identify key, love-related notions in specific artworks and cultural productions.

● Will be able to use interdisciplinary and comparative research methods to establish relationships between philosophy, art, literature and cinema, as well as between classical and contemporary works.

● Will be able to link aesthetic and cultural forms to specific and social and historical contexts.