This will be a class that focuses on the construction of the love story and on the “natural” feelings that serve as its basis; we will examine and analyze the correlations between the forms love may take and the shapes of their narratives by surveying a wide variety of love plots from various historical time periods and national literatures. Beginning with prototypical love stories,we will move on to stories about alternative forms of love and ask what happens to narrative form when love’s appearance becomes unconventional.

“The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

—Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

“No, no. It’s spelt Raymond Luxury-Yacht but it’s pronounced Throat-Wobbler Mangrove!”

—Monty Python’s Flying Circus

An East LA-based Chicanx art collective spray-paints the exterior of an art museum in protest of the museum’s exclusionary practices. A Peruvian poet writes difficult and estranging poetry about poverty and suffering. A leftist studio releases a film in Germany the year before Hitler’s rise to power about the trials of a working-class family unable to afford rent. A cultural theorist claims that absurdist plays have more political force than those depicting human unfreedom. Where is the political in art and literature?

“It is one of life’s greatest ironies that, no matter how much we want to be different, wherever we go, there we are. There’s just no getting away from ourselves”

-Ed and Deb Shapiro