Scholars across an array of disciplines including social psychologists have been trying to explain the meaning of love for over a century but its polysemous nature has made it difficult to fully ...understand. In this paper, a quadruple framework of attraction, resonance or connection, trust, and respect are proposed to explain the meaning of love. The framework is used to explain how love grows and dies and to describe brand love, romantic love, and parental love. The synergistic relationship between the factors and how their variations modulate the intensity or levels of love are discussed.
Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven "metaphysical" poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern ...period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises. The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can't exist without poetry's specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love's radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage—to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears.Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.
The meaning of love and its bittersweet nature Wong, Paul T. P.; Mayer, Claude-Hélène
International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England),
01/2023, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Love is the core of human experience and central to our meaning in life and wellbeing, yet it is also a complex concept full of ambiguity and contradiction. The main purpose of this paper is ...fourfold: Firstly, we want to clarify questions such as 'What is the meaning of love?' and 'Why is meaning of love so important to us?' Secondly, we want to explain why love is both suffering and essential for our happiness and mental health. Thirdly, we identify the major types of love and clarify which types are constructive and which are destructive. We also identify the key dimensions of true love. Finally, we emphasise that love does not always mean happiness; rather, it is meant to be a school to teach us important lessons and to make us complete. Therefore, we need to embrace suffering and at the same time cultivate the constructive types of love to improve our mental health and to make the world a more compassionate place.
At first glance, romance seems an improbable angle from which to write a cultural history of the German Democratic Republic. By most accounts the GDR was among the most dour and disciplined of ...socialist states, so devoted to the rigors of Stalinist aesthetics that the notion of an East German romantic comedy was more likely to generate punch lines than lines at the box office.
But in fact, as John Urang shows inLegal Tender, love was freighted as a privileged site for the negotiation and reorganization of a surprising array of issues in East German public culture between 1949 and 1989. Through close readings of a diverse selection of films and novels from the former GDR, Urang offers an eye-opening account of the ideological stakes of love stories in East German culture. Throughout its forty-year existence the East German state was plagued with an ongoing problem of legitimacy. The love story's unique and unpredictable mix of stabilizing and subversive effects gave it a peculiar status in the cultural sphere.
Urang shows how love stories could mediate the problem of social stratification, providing a language with which to discuss the experience of class antagonism without undermining the Party's legitimacy. But for the Party there was danger in borrowing legitimacy from the romantic plot: the love story's destabilizing influences of desire and drive could just as easily disrupt as reconcile. A unique contribution to German studies,Legal Tenderoffers remarkable insights into the uses and capacities of romance in modern Western culture.
"This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also ...an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history."
This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, ...Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed-thedocta puella,or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers-as plaint and confession-but rather from the viewpoint of the women-thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation-James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.