What is love? What does it mean to be a true friend? What bonds of commitment and loyalty should exist in relationships? And why does it matter? This course uses selected case studies from antiquity to the present to explore the different ways that people in China, Japan, and Korea answered these questions over time. We’ll see how people thought about and expressed love, loyalty, and friendship in a wide range of historical materials, including poems and stories, letters and memoirs, eulogies and inscriptions, and medical treatises and philosophical texts. We’ll learn that emotions have a history, and we’ll also see how changing historical forces created new ways of understanding and expressing these fundamental human impulses. Class requirements include attendance and participation in-class activities, response essays and document annotation exercises, and a final creative or research project. This course satisfies the humanities distribution requirement and the pre-1800 requirement for the history major.

Intended Audience:

All interested students.