FR371 Love and Its Opposites in Renaissance France

What is the Renaissance if not the period of Love? From around 1400 to 1600 French writing was rife with texts dedicated to love and friendship taking the form of sonnets, odes, romances, treatises and essays.

Yet by the mid-sixteenth century, many French writers have had enough of Love. Rather than praising or conforming to the ideal of Love expounded by lyric poetry throughout western Europe from the Middle Ages, in France a counter-love narrative begins to take hold. Running parallel to the classic paeans to mutuality and reciprocity is a very different story, one in which struggle, competition, and strife reign supreme.

This course will revisit key French texts from the Renaissance as well as explore less canonical authors in order to reimagine the role of Love in this period, teasing out intriguing counter-narratives to the dominant love story. Exploring the fraught territory of Love and its opposites in French Renaissance poetry and prose, students will analyse and probe the modes, forms and symptoms of a tradition at odds with itself.

~ Methods & Approaches ~

The course will employ a hybrid approach, making use of close reading, historical analysis, comparative criticism (e.g. across text and image) and critical and literary theory.

Key to the course is a two-way dialogue between early modernity and the present. Students are encouraged to think of the past not as 'a foreign country' but a living presence, pulsating underneath the surface of our modern everyday.

The course is composed of weekly lectures followed by interactive seminars.

Knowledge of French is a necessary prerequisite.

💔Primary Texts

Excerpts from:

• Maurice Scève, Délie
• Pernette du Guillet, Rymes
• Louise Labé, Débat de Folie et Amour, Sonnets
• Étienne Jodelle, Contr’amour
• Thomas Sébillet, Paradoxe contre l'amour
• Ronsard, Odes
• Montaigne, Essais (‘De l”amitié’ and ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’)

💘Secondary Texts

A sample secondary reading list is included below.

• Giorgio Agamben, ‘Friendship’ in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 2006)
• Ann Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton University Press, 1986)
• Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (University of Chicago Press, 1989)
• Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Duke University Press, 2005)
• Aaron Kunin, Love Three (Wave Books, 2019)
• Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994)
• Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe 1540-1620 (Indiana University Press, 1990)
• Marc Schacter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (London: Ashgate, 2008)