Department of English

• Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

World Cafe Live

3025 Walnut St.

What can we learn about modern Western ideals of love by reading Renaissance love lyrics? Poems by Francisco Petrarch, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and others are still anthologized in popular editions, read at weddings, and quoted in films. Their expressions of unrequited desire and everlasting devotion continue to provide many of our cultural scripts for romance. But these poems also offer quite complicated—some might even say radical—perspectives on the experiences of love, desire, and disillusionment. Sanchez will discuss some of the insights that a careful look at this poetry’s language and history can provide on issues of gender, sexuality, and romance in the past as well as the present.