Fulfills the pre-1900 requirement. In unrequited love, one confronts, in a deprivation as primal, almost, as hunger, the limits of one's power to shape the world, discovers the radically alien nature of others' desires and minds. This course will explore the many complexities of that painful mismatch, and the ways its unresolved contradictions--one is at once singular and replaceable, for instance, trapped in a place at once fated and contingent--leads one to large, intractable literary and aesthetic questions (character, psychology, social embeddedness, ethics). Readings will include texts from many historical periods, fields, and genres: philosophy, psychoanalysis, novels, poems, opera, film, for example.
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