Understanding Love Philosophy, Film, and Fiction [Paperback]

This collection of original essays, written by scholars from disciplines across the humanities, addresses a wide range of questions about love through a focus on individual films, novels, plays, and works of philosophy. The essays touch on many varieties of love, including friendship, romantic love, parental love, and even the love of an author for her characters. How do social forces shape the types of love that can flourish and sustain themselves? What is the relationship between love and passion? Is love between human and nonhuman animals possible? What is the role of projection in love? These questions and more are explored through an investigation of works by authors ranging from Henrik Ibsen to Ian McEwan, from Rousseau to the Coen Brothers.

Susan Wolf, Introduction

1. Macalester Bell, Fording the Great Divide: Grizzly Man and the Possibilities and Limits of Human-Animal Friendship

2. Lawrence Blum, False Symmetries in Far From Heaven

3. Maria DiBattista, The Untold Want of Now, Voyager

4. Frances Ferguson, Communicating Love: Ian McEwan, Saturday, and Personal Affection in the Information Age

5. Christopher Grau, Love, Loss, and Identity in Solaris

6. Nick Halpern, The Embarrassing Father

7. Rae Langton, Projected Love

8. Douglas MacLean, Between Desire and Destruction: Reflections on The Go-Between

9. Toril Moi, , Something that resembles a kind of love: Fantasy and Realism in Little Eyolf

10. Fred Neuhouser, Rousseau's Julie: Passion, Love, and the Price of Virtue

11. David L. Paletz, Sherman's March: Romantic Love in Documentary Films

12. Gilberto Perez, Hitchcock's Family Romance: Allegory in Shadow of a Doubt

13. C.D.C. Reeve, Lessons in Looking: Krzysztof Kieslowski's Short Films on Love

14. Judith Smith, Talking Back to Hollywood Love Stories: 'Marital Realism' Films, 1946-1964

15. George Toles, Dipping into Omnilsh