Elegy: The Poetics of Love and Loss

Can poetry supplement for the dead? Atone for the ravages of love lost? What is the relationship between mourning and eros? This course will focus on a single genre- the elegy from antiquity until today- in order to explore: lyric's love affair with absence; whether desire is directed toward the physical or the phantasmatic, sensuality or sublimation; the tensions between individual and collective mourning; and the politics of gender and sexuality in lyric address. Through careful attention to individual poems, students will learn the art of close reading and how the finer points of rhetoric and poetic form relate to broader social questions.