Breaking Down the Rhetoric of Love in Pop Culture

Winter 2011 English 110.01 Class Blog

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

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Posted by sbaako at 9:46 AM

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Love is a battlefield. Money can’t buy love. Love is blind. True love waits. All you need is love.

These are common clichés, but how do we know what we know about love and romance? From reality dating shows, to music videos, to magazine op/eds, to print and TV ads, a variety of people and texts attempt to inform and manipulate the rhetoric of love and romance. This course won’t attempt to come up with any firm definitions, but instead, will provide students with tools for analyzing representations of love in pop culture.

Through interrogating and unpacking notions of love and romance in contemporary society through the lens of media in sources like I Love You, Man, Enchanted, speeches by past and current presidents, McDonalds and Old Spice ads, GQ and Vogue articles, OK Cupid campaigns, and Lady Gaga performances, we will critically investigate assumptions about our course theme in social, historical and cultural contexts. How do notions of gender influence ideas about love? How does love become a commodity, and how is romance “sold” to us, whether through romantic comedies or ads for dating sites? Can science or culture ever fully define emotional experiences? Why is love so important in society?

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