Last Wednesday students from the english honors seminar organized a conference exploring representations of love in literature. The event was a huge success and we had a great turn out so I just wanted to thank everyone who came. ^^ Prof. McCoy also deserves special thanks for teaching the course, helping us with our projects throughout the year and organizing the entire conference.

I think that everyone did a fantastic job and there was such a range of presentation styles from the more conventional straightforward academic speech (sadly, I think mine fell quite squarely into this category) to more creative, flashy presentations that incorporated slang and pop cultural references and in the case of Matt, an actual dramatic performance. Ariana and Frannie were amazing in their roles as Frederic and Catherine from Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. The visual PowerPoint was also an amazing visual supplement to our discussions of love and for that we have to thank our techies, Jessica and Matt for putting the show together.

I was definitely nervous before giving my presentation because in the previous rehearsals I always spoke too fast and in the end I still feel that I spoke too fast but I did get some positive feedback and compliments from some members of the audience so that was cool. I think the nervousness did eventually subside as I watched my classmates’ present and saw their passion for their projects and how much they enjoyed being up there. Ugo was an amazing MC as expected and he set a great mood for the entire conference. Panel 1- What is love started things off with an intense debate about whether or not love can be defined and how we should go about defining it was really intellectually stimulating and opened the floor for the more specific discussions about love in the other panels. Panel 2- What You Give explored love as a form of selflessness and served as a great contrast to Panel 3- What you Take which interrogated the selfish, possessive aspects of love. Finally Panel 4- What you Make was a great closer for the conference, tying together the notions of making love, love making, and how love is essentially about what two individuals make together, where one person is not just giving and the other just taking because there is a need for mutual reciprocity. Love as what you make also beautifully ties the discussion of love to art and even more specifically, literature.

So to leave you all with an interesting question Prof. McCoy proposed to us at the beginning of the course, “Does Life imitate Art or does Art imitate Life?” While the answer is certainly some murky middle ground in between, it is interesting to examine how much of our conceptions of love comes from the literature we read and the life we observe around us and certainly the act of making art is in some ways very similar to the act of making love.