Fall 2005 Courses

English 316: Love, Desire, and Sexuality in the Renaissance (Tarnoff)

TTh 2:45- 4:15
MAIN 002

Why and how did the themes of courtship, seduction, and desire dominate the poetry of the English and Continental Renaissance? To explore these and other questions, we will look at selections from key texts by Ovid and Petrarch through which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers modeled their own renderings of licit and illicit longing, before turning to poems of forbidden love and betrayal from the court of Henry VIII, an exchange of flirtatious verse between Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Ralegh, sonnets depicting love triangles, same-sex desire, and sexual frustration (and occaisonally consummation) by English courtiers and Venetian courtesans, an epic tale of a female knight’s love-quest, a play about mistaken identities and the erotics of cross-dressing, and the anti-Petrarchan seduction poetry of John Donne.  We will conclude with the legacy of these conventions in the New World, with poems describing love between women written by the late seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Requirements will include three papers, a group presentation, and a final exam.  

Fall 2005 Course Listings