Bad Romance

How many forms can a love story take? How distorted can romance become before it turns into something different? How marked is the difference between courting someone and stalking them, between love and obsession, desire and pathology? In this course we focus on distorted, or "grotesque" love. We examine a few short stories and excerpts of longer novels in order to think about genre, and what we as readers can or cannot expect from a text. Students discover how to read and make sense of disconcerting texts, gaining insights into their greater historical and social contexts along the way. As an additional feature of this course, students have the opportunity to explore the impressive collections of the Harvard Art Museum. We look at art works that are labeled as "grotesque" in order to examine what it means to distort and change an image in art, and how it compares to literature. At the end of the course, students have the option to produce either a critical analysis of a text we read or to write their own bad romance story.