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"I'm your biggest fan / I'll follow you until you love me" Lady Gaga has the Paparazzi cry out in her song of the same name and, in doing so, casts the stalking photographers into a role strikingly similar to that of the Elizabethan courtiers sonneteering their Petrarchan ladies. As in this example, many pop song lyrics (ab)use rhetorics and the metaphors taken from the Petrarchan poetic tradition. These well-known literary commonplaces – or topoi – connect popular music to a long literary tradition and, in the way they are used, also say a lot about notions of love and human relationships in our current culture. Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca had a profound influence on English poetry of the Renaissance, transforming the medieval neo-Platonic ideas of courtly love into a new relation between lovers in which the ultimate salvation of the man through the grace of the Virgin Mary that was implied in Neo-Platonism is exchanged for a more complex form of worshiping the beloved lady. In Petrarchism, desire is never fully sublated into a selfless love of caritas, but sexual desire always, in the end, gets the better of the (male) lover. This relation is still present today, especially in pop music of the 1980s-2000s.
In this seminar, we will first discover the most common literary topoi in their original literary form by reading poems from Elizabethan sonnets or pastoral poetry. We will start by reading and analyzing the concepts presented in Petrarchan poetry of the Renaissance and will then, in the second part of the seminar, set out to re-trace their evolution in late 20th century pop songs by looking at the lyrics but also taking into account the performative aspect as represented in the music video genre.
A reader will be provided at the beginning of the seminar. |
