Love is in the air for these three Penn classes

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke with Penn professors teaching classes about love.  

Across Penn’s four undergraduate schools, students can take three courses on the topic — Shakespeare in Love, Love and Loss in Japanese Literary Traditions: In Translation, and Love’s Labor: The Invention of Dating. The classes, hosted in the English, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Writing departments respectively, offer students a wide range of academic perspectives on love and romance. 

“With LOVE at the very heart of campus life, it feels both fitting and necessary for Penn students to be able to study it in the classroom,” Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department and 2010 College graduate Becky Friedman wrote.

Friedman teaches Shakespeare in Love — ENGL 1021 — in the English Department. In the class, students get “to know the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote” by reading plays such as “Romeo and Juliet” and “Othello.”

According to Friedman, students are asked to think “through how his plays got from his mind to the page to the theatre to printed text and the versions we have in the classroom,” and consider the impact Shakespeare’s work has on today’s culture.

She emphasized the importance of being able “to look at material that’s hundreds of years old” and recognize “a feeling in it that you’ve had.” 

For Friedman’s class, this includes discussing adaptations of the plays, such as the 1998 romantic comedy film “Shakespeare in Love.”

“The theme of love is what is important in the title … Every play we’re reading this semester, we’re looking at through the lens of love,” Friedman explained. “Shakespeare’s work is really abounding in love stories.” 

“Even if it’s not a play that people necessarily associate with love, we can find ways to look at this theme and draw it out,” she added.

She described how there are “certain qualities to Shakespeare” that “automatically” evoke feelings in readers, and “love is one of those.” 

“Whether it’s love at first sight, unrequited love, love as performance, true love; Shakespeare’s work captures love in all of its varieties,” Friedman said. 

Love and Loss in Japanese Literary Traditions: In Translation — EALC 1242 — is taught by Associate Chair of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and associate professor of Japanese language and literature Linda Chance. 

In this course, students discuss 1,000 years of Japanese literature, including “poetry, narrative, theater, and related arts of calligraphy, painting, and music.”

Chance explained how her course’s title was inspired by a colleague’s class titled “Love and Death.” 

“It’s ok to love the subject you work on,” Chance said while describing her course material.

According to Chance, lots of students experience her course as a “break from other classes.” By the end of the semester, she added, “there are always some couples that have met through the class.”

Love’s Labor: The Invention of Dating, taught by Dajuan Ferrell — WRIT 0880 — describes the history of dating and modern dating prospects. 

Per the course description, students read “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating” — which “employs a feminist lens to trace the development of modern dating” — to learn about the development of the contemporary dating framework. 

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