STORIES and THEORIES of LOVE Bényei Tamás

BTAN2106MA STORIES AND THEORIES OF LOVE Bényei Tamás Thu 12.00-13.40 (on two occasions, when we have film screenings: 10.00-13.40) Room 111

The course will explore some of the ways in which European culture has been trying to make sense of the experience of love and desire by weaving stories and theories about it. We shall look at the persistent tendency to resolve the ambiguity of love by dividing it into two kinds (sacred and profane love, Eros and Agape, etc.), and explore some of the major myths and representations of love developed by European culture (Platonic love, Christian love, Narcissus, Don Juan, the myth of passion vs. marriage, the secret link between love and death). The texts discussed and analysed in the course of the seminar will include verbal narratives, theoretical texts, visual representations and films. Requirements: the success of the seminars will greatly depend on your contributions; it is essential, therefore, that participants read the assigned material (the quantity of which will be kept at a reasonable level) and contribute to the discussion. Since there is no end-term test, seminar participation will be an important factor in the grades. Presentations are encouraged. Home essay (for those not in their final year). Deadline: 12.00, 19 May. Length: 2,500-3,000 words. Only typewritten essays will be accepted. Essays must be written in the form of a research paper: use of secondary material and scholarly documentation, conforming to the MLA Style Sheet, are essential. Failure to meet any of these requirements will result in the reduction of the grade. Plagiarism and academic dishonesty will, without any further comment, result in a failure as described in the Academic Handbook of the Institute.

Schedule 1 18 Febr. Introduction: Eros and Psyche 2 25 Febr. Platonic love: Eros Plato: Symposium* 3 3 March. Love and philosophy, desire and subjectivity Plato: Phaedrus (to section 257)*

(recommended: Descartes, Spinoza – see bibliography) 4 12 March Neoplatonic love: Renaissance ideas of love Marsilio Ficino: A szerelemről* (“Commentaries on Plato’s Symposium”) Paintings: Titian: Sacred and Profane Love Botticelli: Primavera; The Birth of Venus 5 17 March Christian love; Eros, Agape, Caritas Brief excerpts from the New Testament (5Matthew, 12 Mark, 1 John, letters of Paul) xerox Excerpts from St. Augustine: Confessions*

Recommended: Ramón Llull (see bibliography) 6 24 March Love as suffering, game and redemption: courtly love, Petrarchan love Petrarch: “Canzone No. XXIII” Comedy as the world of Eros William Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing 7 31 March CONSULTATION WEEK

8 7 April The myth of passion (vs. marriage). Eros and Thanatos, love and from10.00 death Trisztán és Izolda (Joseph Bédier’s version)* Recommended texts: Beroul: The Romance of Tristan; Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan; Thomas: “Tristan”; The prose Romance of Tristan; Malory: Morte d’Arthur; Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde; Matthew Arnold: “Tristram and Iseult”; Swinburne: “Tristram of Lyonesse”; Tennyson: “The Last Tournament” (Arnold, Swinburne, Tennyson, and many other versions available at the Tristan and Isolt page of the Camelot Project, at the University of Rochester (www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/ trismenu.htm) 9 14 April Tristan and Yseult Jean Delannoy: L’Éternel Retour (film, 1943; script by Jean Cocteau, with Jean Marais) (film screening) Brief excerpts from Richard Wagner’s libretto Tristan und Isolde 10 21 April (Post)modern theories of love: Stendhal, Freud, Bataille, Barthes, Girard, Kristeva, Belsey, Zizek (student presentations)

excerpt from Georges Bataille: Eroticism Roland Barthes: Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse (excerpts) René Girard: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (excerpts) 11 28 April Narcissistic love Ovidius: “Narcissus és Echo” * excerpt from Jean de Meun  Guillaume de Lorris: The Romance of the Rose (the Narcissus story)* short excerpt from Book IV of Milton’s Paradise Lost* Narcissus in painting (Caravaggio, Nicolas Poussin, Benczúr Gyula, Salvador Dalí)

recommended: Freud: “On Narcissism”* 12 5 May Pygmalionic love Ovid: “Pygmalion”* excerpt from Jean de Meun  Guillaume de Lorris: The Romance of the Rose (the Pygmalion story) Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Browne’s Wooden Image”* Pygmalion in painting (Jacopo Pontormo, Edward Burne-Jones) 13 12 May Seduction. The myth of Don Juan starting at Tirso de Molina: A sevillai szédelgő 10.00 Mozart – Da Ponte: Don Giovanni (libretto) Peter Sellars’s production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (on film) (film screening)

Recommended: Jeremy Leven’s film: Don Juan de Marco (1995) (recommended: Molière: Don Juan; Christian Grabbe: Faust és Don Juan; Max Frisch: Don Juan avagy a geometria szerelmese. All these texts are also available in Az örök Don Juan, ed. Vajda György Mihály (Bp., Magyar Helikon, 1968) Highly recommended: On Mozart’s opera, an excellent source is Fodor Géza: A Mozart- opera világképe (Bp., Typotext, 2002)

Also cf. Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992, Ch. 5, available in the University Main Library) 14 19 May ESSAY DEADLINE NB. The assigned texts are available in the course packet (marked *) or will be supplied Bibliography (*= available in the Institute Library)

General theories Ramon Lull: A szeretet filozófiájának fája (Bp., é. n.) Plotinos: A szépről és a jóról - Istenről és a hozzá vezető utakról (Bp., 1998) Ficino: A szerelemről: kommentár Platón A lakoma című művéhez (Bp., Arcticus, 2001) Pascal: Írások a szerelem szenvedélyéről… (Bp., Osiris, 1999) Descartes: A lélek szenvedélyei (Szeged: Ictus, 1994) Spinoza: Etika (Bp., Gondolat, 1977) Stendhal: A szerelemről (Bp., Gondolat, 1962) René Girard: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988) Roland Barthes: Beszédtöredékek a szerelemről (Bp., Atlantisz, 1997) (Fragments of a Discourse of Love. Penguin) Georges Bataille: Eroticism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1993). Az erotika (Bp., 2001) C. S. Lewis: The Allegory of Love (Oxford Univ. Press, 1936)* ---: The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1960. Remy de Gourmont: A szerelem fizikája (Bp., Révai, 1912) Arthur Schopenhauer: A nemi szerelem metafizikája (Bp., 1992) Sigmund Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Pelican Freud Vol. 7: On Sexuality). Freud: A szexuális élet pszichológiája (Bp., Cserépfalvi, 1995) Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Pelican Freud Vol. 11: Metapsychology). A halálösztön és az életösztönök (Bp., Múzsák, 1991) Freud: „A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men”; „On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (Pelican Freud Vol. 7: On Sexuality, 227-42, 243-60) Slavoj Zizek: The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso,1997. José Ortega y Gasset: A szerelemről (Bp., Akadémiai, 1991) Denis de Rougemont: A szerelem a nyugati világban (Bp: Helikon, 1998) D. H. Lawrence: “Love” (in Selected Essays)* Sartre: A lét és a semmi (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2006) (III. rész, 3. fej.) Lauren Berlant – Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Lauren Berlant. Desire/Love. New York: Punctum Books, 2012. Nádas Péter: Az égi és a földi szerelemről (Bp., Szépirodalmi, 1991) Martha C. Nussbaum: Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.* Oxford UP,1990. Jerome Neu. “Odi et Amo: On Hating the Ones We Love”. Freud and the Passions (ed. John O’Neill), University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996, 53-72. Boros Gábor – Pólya Tibor (ed.). Szenvedély, szerelem, narráció: filozófiai és pszichológiai tanulmányok. Budapest: ELTE, 2014. Boros Gábor: A szeretet/szerelem filozófiája: szisztematikus-történeti tanulmányok. Budapest: ELTE, 2014.

Jared Diamond: Miért élvezet a szex? Az emberi szexualitás evolúciója (Bp., Kulturtrade, 1997) Marlene Zuk. Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn about Sex from Animals. Berkeley: U of Californoia Press, 2001.

Historical-theoretical surveys Catherine Belsey: Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)* Julia Kristeva: Tales of Love (New York, Columbia UP, 1993)* Irving Singer: The Nature of Love I-III (Chicago UP, 1984-1987) Michel Foucault: A szexualitás története I-III (Bp., Atlantisz, from 1996 [poor translation; available in English*) Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilisation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)* Wayland Young: Eros Denied (London: Corgi, 1968)

Stephen Kern: The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1994) Camille Paglia: Sexual Personae - Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Penguin, 1991) Suzanne Lilar: Aspects of Love in Western Society (London: Panther, 1967, orig. in French: Le Couple) Anthony Giddens. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticismin Modern Society. Stanford UP, 1992. Peter Goodrich. The Laws of Love: A Brief Historical and Practical Manual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jan Bremmer. From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1989.

Specific topics James Gollnick. Love and the Soul. The Psychological Interpretation of the Eros and Psyche Myth. Wilfried Laurier UP, 1992. Barbara Breitenberger. Aphrodite and Eros: The Development of Erotic Mythology in Early Greek Poetry and Cult. London: Routledge, 2007. Iris Murdoch: “The Fire and the Sun” (in Existentialists and Mystics, Penguin, 1999)* Calame, Claude. The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece. Princeton UP, 1992. Anders Nygren: Agape and Eros (1932-9). London: SPCK, 1982. Gerasimos Santas. Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Laurence D. Cooper. Eros in Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. Hannah Arendt. Love and Saint Augustine (1929). University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Szabics Imre: A trubadúrok költészete. Bp: Balassi, 1995. Slavoj Zizek: “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing”. The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso, 2005.

Roger Scruton. Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Oxford UP, 2004. Marion A. Wells. The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance. Stanford UP, 2007. Peggy Kamuf: Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982) Tony Tanner: Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Jonhs Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979) George Steiner: “Eros and Idiom” (in On Difficulty, London, Faber, 1981)* Niklas Luhmann: Szerelem-Szenvedély: Az intimitás kódolásáról (Bp., Jószöveg Könyvek, 1997) Keith Harvey – Celia Shalom (ed.). Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy. London: Routledge, 1997

Lynn Hunt (ed.). Eroticism and the Body Politic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. David Bell – Gill Valentine. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1995. Dominic Pettman. Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age. New York: Fordham UP, 2006. Eva Illouz. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1997. ---: Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Feona Attwood (ed.). Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture. London: Tauris, 2009.

Simon Blackburn. Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love. Princeton UP, 2014. Louise Vinge. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19 th Century. Lund: Gleerups, 1967.

Søren Kierkegaard: Mozart Don Juanja (Bp. Európa, 1993 [also available in Kierkegaard’s Vagy-vagy) Georg Simmel: A kacérság lélektana (Bp., Atlantisz, 1996) Jean Baudrillard. On Seduction. Montreal: CultureTexts, 1990. Leo Weinstein. The Metamorphoses of Don Juan. New York: AMS Press, 1967. Lydia Goehr – Daniel Herwitz (ed).The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera. New York: Columbia UP. Vajda György Mihály, Don Juan vándorútja (Bp., Argumentum-Gondolat, 1993)