Love and Friendship

We will start with Plato's Phaedrus, to learn about love and its relationship to speaking and writing, and then turn to Aristotle's Ethics, to consider friendship in relation to politics. Then we will read: Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Shakespeare Sonnets; Montaigne's essay, "Of Friendship"; Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary;

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and Plato’s Symposium. We will also study The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, by Sister Miriam Joseph, and we will watch two movies: The Philadelphia Story and Anna Karenina.