Reed Haight - "You See the World"

As I sat down to do this project I thought to myself, What is the most important thing I have learned this year? I considered all of the novels and short stories and essays we read, all of the lectures and video clips and movies we watched and every discussion we had. It hit me that, although we didn’t really explicitly discuss it, self-love was at the core of everything, typically, it was lacking.

In all three novels, the characters felt that they were unworthy unless someone was in love with them. Each character was incapable of generating that deep level of love for themselves and, thus, none of their love was what Sternberg would call “consummate love,” (if you recall from my research paper last semester). Instead, any love that the characters managed to get at was more along the lines of desire and there was always a sense of emptiness within them.

Thinking about all of this, I started considering what I have gone through in the few years and, especially, what I have learned from all of it. Although it has been a difficult year for me, I have come out of it much stronger than I was going in. So, I asked myself why? What has changed within me that made all of those terrible things in my past suddenly seem bearable when they were not a year ago? The answer could not have been clearer: self-love.

I had gone from loathing myself and criticizing every little thing I did, allowing the perfectionist in me free reign, to working my way towards mental and emotional peace. I have begun truly appreciating everything within myself, the flaws, the strengths, the weaknesses, everything. Through this self-love, I have found such serene peace and happiness that I am almost always bursting with it! Although there is still a long way to go on my journey within self-love, I have made immense progress and it has changed my life.

Bringing this back to the class, I chose to write a poem about this self-love (the woman in the poem representing myself), because earlier in the year, although I hate to admit it, I was more like the characters in those books. Although I wouldn’t have gone nearly as far as any of them did in the search for fulfillment through another and I was far more aware of the impossibility of another fulfilling me, I was certainly relying on outside sources to show me my own worthiness. Now, though, I have found that I am not only deserving of love, both inside and out, but I am love.

Rebecca Verosloff

            I have been going through a lot of change in my life. With change comes ways to see things differently, to be able to look at a situation from a different side. For the last seven years I’ve been in a relationship, recently we both decided that it was time to see the world from a different, single perspective. It is true that you never really know what something is going to be like until you are there. Being single is one of those things for me. I had all of these expectations of what my new life was going to bring me. I have to admit that very few of those expectations were even remotely close to the reality that ensued. This is why I decided to make this cartoon for my visual project about love and desire.

            I chose to make a cartoon of my life. I broke my life into certain scenarios that became prevalent in my newly single life. These scenarios were: single life, college life, partying, and after sex. These cartoons are nothing less than the reality that occurred, the hopeful expectations followed by the over scrutinized reality. The first window hold the expectations that I’d held before the setting occurred of how I would think and feel while the second window held the cynical and almost depressing realities that occurred as I lived through them.

            This project was an opportunity to open myself up and reflect on how I have developed these expectations. By making it, it has helped me to understand how much the media actually influences me. I hope that this cartoon could also help others to understand themselves better so that we can become more aware of our expectations and be able to formulate more realistic expectations.

Hannah Crosby

Who should have the power to dictate who loves who? “Love Knows No Limits” is the title of my presentation because no matter how you identify yourself your relationship should never be forbidden. I’ve grown to be a passionate supporter of same sex couples and encourage all those who love the same sex to embrace who they are. Same sex couples are entitled to a happy love life.

Entering the University of Hartford has challenged my previous knowledge with diversity. I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire and did not have the opportunity to experience the wealth of diversity I have had here. I have met many people who are in same sex relationships and I find it so rejuvenating. Their perseverance to fight through the struggles of being openly gay is incredible. When I find relationships I have been in struggling or hard to bear I have to remember that at least I still have the ability to walk out in public holding my significant other’s hand.

“Love Knows No Limits” is a powerful statement giving all people the opportunity to love. Knowing no limit in love is not only representative of same sex couples, but heterosexual couples as well. I decided for my visual project to write a poem and display some pictures that are meaningful to me. One of the men in the wedding photographs is a supervisor of mine that I admire tremendously and it was awesome he allowed me to display his special day. Having the enthusiasm to love who you are no matter whom you love is inspiring and my supervisor embodies every bit of that quality.

I decided to write a cento which is a poem composed of previously written works of art. I wrote it from the perspective of a homosexual. This was difficult to immerse myself into another perspective that I am not accustomed too, but it helped me understand the difficulties that a homosexual would face expressing how they feel to the world. In my opinion, people should challenge their beliefs and do something similar to writing this poem because it has made me more aware and understanding than I already was. I have a very open heart and mind to same sex couples.

Additionally, in my presentation I posted a map of the nation that highlights the different supporting laws of same sex partnerships, unions, and marriages. I find this helpful to understand how much of our country still does not recognize same sex marriage. I do believe that our nation is moving forward in changing laws to make same sex marriage recognized and legalized nationwide.

Lastly, I asked a few people that I know who are in a same sex relationship or marriage to share their “coming out” story. “Coming out” is when the individual expresses his or her sexual orientation to others. This process is challenging because people are not always accepting of others. I feel really passionate about sharing my voice to help others to have the sexual and intimate freedom that they deserve and desire. 

Catherine Brennan

Stephanie Lynch

Between the novels, short stories and poetry we have read, I have learned so much. The lecture series has provided further knowledge as well as a deeper analysis by the authors or presenters. Although there already exists a common theme among their topics, love and desire, I have gotten much more out of them that what the name reveals. The most important thing I have taken away from this year -long seminar is the realization of the various forms love can take. Growing up in a destructive environment, I always believed my broken family was wrong or bad because it wasn’t the picturesque family I saw on TV and in magazines. However, all of the knowledge I have gained since last September has caused me to think otherwise. Love does not have to exist in the way society presents it to us. Love can exist wherever we want with whomever we want. As professor Freund said, all things are interpreted differently by different people, which is why symbols were frowned upon in earlier times. No single symbol could encompass the entire meaning of something such as love. In the poems of Steve Almond we saw many different kinds of love. We saw an imperfect and fleeting summer love, just there to pass the time because that is all they wanted out of it at the time. We also saw very different side of love and vulnerability often unspoken or unheard of. His poems as well as his analysis come to show us that there is nothing to be ashamed of. We love what we love and desire what we desire. We cannot help it, so why fight it? In the movie before sunset, we see both characters indulging in 24 hours of loving affairs that they both know must end very soon. In that situation their version of love just happened to be short lived. Lucy Brown taught us about the chemical reasons why we desire one another or hold on to one another. Love is an emotion encompassing all areas of the body and mind. We cannot fight what we love and should not be ashamed, judge ourselves or judge others for what we cannot control. I have found myself appreciating the love in my life and loving relationships where I used to question them. I am so lucky to have people who love me, I shouldn’t be spending time analyzing them or their faults. If love presents itself in your life, just dive in!

Kelly DeSalvatore - "Buying Love"

Link to project:

BUYING LOVE

Sarah Lawes - "September of 1989"

There were many aspects of the poem that were inspired not only by the poem “I Go Back to May 1937” but also by many lectures in the class.  The poem “I Go Back to May 1937” is what gave me the initial idea of writing about my parents and their divorce, but the themes within my poem were inspired mainly by three lectures.

The first lecture, which was about divorce and dating after divorce, was what began my thought process on the poem.  It is much harder for divorcees to get back into the dating world because of different types of baggage such as: children, exes, and trust and emotional issues.  Because I have watched my mother try to get back into the dating scene since my parent’s divorce, I could relate to this lecture.  Once I began thinking about my mother in this new dating scene, it led me to think about her divorce and how I felt about it.  I never really knew how I felt about it, but other lectures gave me more insight into love, which helped he have more understanding.

When I had to think about how I felt about my parent’s divorce when writing the poem, I constantly went back to the question that Garren Small asked: Does love conquer all?  Therefore, the poem plays off of my answer to that question.  In the poem, I essentially say to answer that question that love does not necessarily prevail all the time, which is why people should enjoy it while they can. 

Another lecture that had a major influence on my poem is Lucy Brown’s lecture.  In her lecture, she discussed love at first sight and the early stage of intense romantic love.  During this stage, and individual may experience intrusive thinking about the person they desire, special meanings of the persona and overlooking their faults, intense energy making it hard to sleep, loss of appetite, mood swings, craving to be around the person, and rearranging their daily plans to be around the other person more frequently.  Through imagery, I showed how my parents became very consumed with each other.  In the early stage, parts of the brain are activated, which makes it as a natural euphoria.  I used the imagery of stars to show this fantasy that does take over people’s minds when they first meet someone they are attracted to.  Another aspect of Brown’s lecture that strongly influenced the poem is the study that Brown performed, which showed what two factors kept couples together.  The couples that stayed together suppressed negative judgment and the concept of self.  I tried to show this in my poem when I wrote about “his broken bottles and empty apologies and her harsh words.”  It is clear that my father did not put my mother first, and my mother constantly criticized my father.  This gave me the most insight from all the lectures because their relationship really could not succeed because these were the biggest issues in their relationship.

Finally, the last aspect of the class that inspired my poem was when Garren Small read the poem “One Day”.  The poem is essentially a son reflecting on his parents and understanding all they have done for him.  That poem touches upon forgiving your parents because they could not live up to expectations, which gave me insight on how to end the poem.  Also, the poem helped me have understanding that my parents are only human just like me, which not only gave me insight personally, but also heavily inspired the poem.  

Stephanie Pelletier

Feeling inspired from Dr. Brown’s lecture, I decided to illustrate an image of two skeletons and a heart between them. To me, this image symbolizes the biological, fundamental aspect of love that Dr. Brown was speaking of- love is just as essential as our need to drink and eat. I wanted the image to be handmade and raw- love in a bare, quintessentially human form. We are all connected by our bones, kept alive by our hearts, and although it is true that the feeling of love is in our brains our hearts are intimately connected to that current state of love.

This image is relative to the ideas and themes discussed in class because it is so versatile, and can connect to any topic we discussed. For example, when we were discussing Django Unchained during Dr. Reed’s lecture, and looking at racism, the image of two skeletons and a heart is very much connected to the issue of racism. Despite as cliché as it sounds, love is love, despite outward appearance, and if it is strong enough it can overcome social adversity.

I also chose to make this image because I love the visual of a skeleton and a heart- I think the icon that typically represents a heart is interesting but also inaccurate, as a real heard doesn’t look like that. Why did this unique icon even come into play in the first place? Was the actual image of a heart too grotesque, too “real” to be duplicated through endless kinds of media? Perhaps as humans we want that distance from our bodies, as we cannot actually be distant from them, and want to imagine that this icon with a triangular bottom and circular top represents love and desire. I wanted to make a more accurate representation of a heart and prove that it doesn’t have to be gross or appalling, that it can be interesting and maybe even aesthetically appealing.

Stephanie Lessing - "Ten Types of Love"

There are ten types of love most people will experience in life. Not everyone experiences all of them but can usually relate to them regardless of their own love history. These types of love allow us to relate to one another even though a love felt by one couple cannot be fully comprehended by another pair.

First, platonic  love is one of the first types of love people experience. This is a firm friendship in which there is no romantic involvement but you have a deep connection and love for the other person. Typically, this love is for your best friend or a sibling. Evidence of such a love is when you are separated and you miss the other person. This type of love is important because it allows us to feel connected to people who we will never be romantically involved with and just genuinely care about them.

Crushes are the second type of love that most people experience between the ages of 4 and 13. According to Urban Dictionary, a crush is “a painful experience, very common among middle schoolers (and high schooler’s and even adults to a lesser degree) that involves being obsessed with a member of the opposite sex (or the same sex, if u prefer), being attracted to them physically (most common), or emotionally- also called ‘puppy love.’” But a crush does not have to be a painful experience and can actually be the lead up to a relationship which is hopefully not as painful.

Unrequited love if love for someone who does not love you back or simply heartbreak. This type of love can range from having feelings for someone you know will never love you back to being involved in an on-again-off-again relationship or just having a bad breakup. Unrequited love could be categorized as debilitating. It causes people to question their personality, appearance, and life ambitions. It can even push people into a rut of self-loathing if the object of their desire has a negative reaction to him. All in all, unrequited love can leave people in a volatile state.

Obsessive love is arguably the most destructive type of love. Obsessive love is usually only harmful for the person holding the obsession because it can lead to an unhealthy dependence or possessiveness that drives the other person away. It more severe cases, obsessive love can be dangerous to the object of desire. It can involve a loss of personal privacy and aggressive, abusive or violent behavior on the part of the obsessive person. Obsessive love does not always have to be destructive but could just be considered being heavily invested in someone else’s life. It is sometimes only evident in the beginning stages of a relationship but can continue even after the end of a relationship.

Selfish love is born out of narcissism. Selfish love is almost not even a love between two people but rather a mutual love for the same person. Simply put, maybe your husband loves you and you love you, but you might not love him. You just love that he loves you. People who could be considered selfish lovers may avoid committed relationships or take relationships very lightly or be almost indifferent toward a bond with another person.

Aww love is that cute fairytale only-gonna-last-6-months kind of a love. This type of couple makes all of their friends jealous because they are so into each other and they seem like soul mates. Aww love is sometimes a lead in to a serious relationship or just a temporary little fling, but either way, it does not usually last very long.

Similar to platonic  love is same sex love which is love for a best friend of the same sex but not usually in a sexual way. This type of love is not so much about attraction and more about respect or maybe almost a brotherly or sisterly love.

Lusty love is plain old attraction. It is the kind of love experienced when two people cannot keep their hands off of each other whenever they are together. Needless to say, lusty love is less about an interpersonal or deep and realized connection and more just about sex.

Romantic love is the type that can take up all of your thoughts for weeks and cause you to walk around in a daze. Being with the other person becomes your top priority and the world can see that you love each other because it is written all over your faces.

Finally, unconditional love is what we might argue people might desire most later in life. Unconditional love is just that, it has no conditions. It is forever, no matter what, even if one of two dies or they break up. Unconditional love could be for a sexual partner but also for a close family member like a child or parent. Unconditional love in terms of a committed couple is like fairytale ending for two old people, still in love after years of marriage or a younger couple staying together through a rough experience.

Mikala Guyton - "The Dunce and the Faulty Dream"

The painting that I created for the visual project not only pays homage to my own experiences as a young girl, but to the experiences of many women, who at one point during their young adulthood, felt inadequate.

The painting depicts a young girl who is wearing pastel and beige (what could be considered boring colors) and a “dunce” cap who is imagining a girl who is wearing more extravagant clothing with stronger colors. The girl feels inadequate --which is evident in from the "dunce" cap-- because she does not look like the girl that she is imagining, and she dreams of becoming this ideal of perfection.

These feelings that the girl has are not purely self-inflicted. These ideals of perfection are derived from the images all around her: on television, in magazines, and in movies. I used images from Teen Vogue to help portray this. Teen Vogue is a magazine targeted at younger girls, feeding them the message that this is what they should strive to look like when they get older. As with many other aspects of media in society, these messages force young women to compare themselves with images that are unrealistic, and girls are often humiliated by others for not being able to live up to these images.

A young girl's sexuality is also thrown into a state of confusion. The girl being imagined has no face. She is wearing revealing and tight-fitting clothes. She is wearing white, a common symbol of purity, as well as crimson red, a symbol of lust or eroticism. I wanted to show the virgin-whore dichotomy that plagues the minds of many young girls. This same dichotomy was also present in the film That Obscure Object of Desire. Conchita was expected to both give-in to Mathieu while also rejecting him and staying virginal. Because of this, she became an object, or a challenge to conquer. So much so that it didn’t even matter that the actress changed. Who Conchita really was didn't matter.  

Within society, women are expected to be pure and virginal while also being lascivious and desirable. This is an impossible standard to live up to! And why should women have to? I wanted to bring attention to the difficulties women face while growing-up, especially when it comes to growing into their sexuality.

Claire Capozzi - "Hooking Up"

Hooking Up

            Being in college, “hooking up” is a popular, in-your-face thing. Almost every weekend, I’m incidentally hearing campus gossip of who did the walk-of-shame that morning or who was found crying in a bathroom in the 7’s. Excuses like being too drunk or rebounding after a bad breakup are often given, as a disclaimer. “I was so drunk—I don’t remember anything.” Because even though “everyone is doing it,” no one wants to risk getting a reputation.

            Something I’ve noticed, in almost everything we’ve read so far, was that there was always some type of commitment. Even if one or both parties didn’t want to be in a relationship—or sometimes a marriage—they still stuck around like we see in Madame Bovary. Even if both are miserable, even if they’ve gotten into a fight, they remain together. With hook ups, though, the commitment part is absent. In fact, this is what the whole act is based on. There’s still the idea that satisfaction could be reached and that two people can experience extreme intimacy for a few hours and then they never have to speak to each other again.

            Yet, at the same time, we see some similarities between hooking up and what we’ve read in class. In Celestina, the couple met and fell in love quickly. Although it could be argued that they weren’t actually in love because they barely knew each other, they still were quick to jump into bed together—like hooking up. Again, though, the only difference is that even in Celestina, where the encounter was brief, both parties still made a commitment to stay with each other, to eventually get married and to carry out a life together. And still again, in The Bad Girl, the “good boy” was ultimately with the “bad girl” the entire time. He would go back to her as long as she was willing to keep coming back to him and the intensity of feelings and intimacy was still there.

            Another difference between all these relationships and hooking up is that there are no feelings involved with this hook up culture. At least, there shouldn’t be. We see this play out in movies and even closer, on college campus, making this the mainstream. By conflating sex with love thus creating hooking up from what we’ve seen previous, and to make commitment a taboo instead of the norm, we’ve made an entirely new culture which is strikingly different from what we’ve been reading but still somewhere in the back of my mind all throughout class.

Casey Beasley - "Double Vision"

For my visual project I felt the medium that I could best articulate my feelings through would be a mixed media sculpture, however in the fine arts most of the time the description is left up to the viewer themselves because each individual will have a different reaction to the piece based on what makes up their background. Now that being said I will describe my piece entitled “Double Vision” in the traditional way sculpture is critiqued by breaking it down into its separate elements and explaining how each element builds the full picture that I wished to portray to my audience.

The general description of the piece is as follows:

Two faces, both androgynous, blank, and brilliant white gaze at each other longingly through a pane of glass. The glass becomes slightly reflective as bright light illuminates the faces making the viewer wonder just who are they staring at so longingly? Their partner or themselves? The empty positive forms of the masks are self-contrasted with a more matte dark black interior that highlights the understated negative form on the inside. Both sides of the hollow masks are complimented by a matte black and white base which serves as a functional unifying agent of the piece itself. The pane of glass is positioned on the diagonal to better cater to the needs of a more interesting juxtaposition of the piece as a whole. The glass is rimed with a thin frame of matte black to help it better transition into harmony with the base. The black white faces both balance on delicate wrists and expressive hands in a pensive position yet their proximity to each other indicates more. What are they doing? They are lovers, scrutinizing what they both see through and in the glass for as long as they remain frozen there. 

Each material used in this sculpture was picked with a purpose, the paint colors for instant are used to simultaneously contrast and unify giving them the benefit over more vibrant colors which may have had the side effect of distracting from the piece itself. By using two different models for the piece it introduced different bone structure and made the blank faces more interesting by highlighting their similarities through differences. Note that while they are both black and white casted forms with expressive hands one face is slightly smaller indicating a more effeminate form while the other face is more domineering in bone structure perhaps making it more masculine yet the smaller form has a more dramatic hand positioning, seemingly making it more aggressive while the larger form has a nurturing hand opening the face up to more of an exposed expression. While both faces are generally expressionless this was done to escape the cliché act of recreating the theater masks, why over emphasize the expression when it is better left off for interpretation by the audience? By doing so  the piece invites one to partake in a transference of emotion with whoever is viewing it therefore faces that were essentially left blank can now be viewed as contemplative, contemptuous, or just plain bored with their partner.

The theme of our class that has really stuck with me and grown on me through the course of our time together is the idea of questioning what do we really love? What do we see in one another or what do we see in the person who holds our affections unwittingly? This is essentially the reasoning behind the lover/beloved dynamic, in which the beloved is simply an object of ones affections and the lover is chasing after a mirage craving something in the other person that does not exist. What we chase after is really a fulfillment of self which cannot be achieved because we seek this completion of self through another person and what we see in that person that we crave does not even exist. To put this idea into a strange context consider that you have been on a road trip for a while heading to house sit for a friend in a different state but unfortunately you had the poor idea of not bringing any food with you and when you arrive in town everything is already closed for the evening. You pull up to the house, park your car, drag your bags inside, and head straight for the kitchen. Imagine the relief that floods you upon seeing a cozy kitchen with decorated cabinets and softly humming refrigerator, and now imagine the betrayal you feel upon opening the door of the refrigerator to find that it is completely empty as are the cabinets. In this scenario seeing the kitchen gave you a false sense of relief, much like when people fall in love they often feel completed without receiving anything tangible, and when it was realized that the blind trust that was put into the refrigerator would be violated the fall was much harder. The sense of blind hope that people put into one another when it comes to love can be a very dangerous thing however it seemingly can be successful in some cases. 

Aven Rose - "Running Away"

When I sat down to do this project, I had no idea how to start. I went through so many different ideas, all of which felt inadequate to the goal I had set for myself. Then I sat down at the piano to practice a song my sister had taught me over break, and all the pieces started falling into place. I realized that the words of the song fit into the themes of this class really well, and considered recording it as part of my visual project. When I had finished recording the song, adding some of my own harmonies, I started thinking about the themes of the song, and looking through pictures. (All the pictures used in the video were taken by me.)

            In the beginning of the video, I put a montage of people in love—couples who are happy with each other and in their relationships. I thought this would be a good way to start the video, as it makes the later pictures more poignant in my opinion. I transitioned from the pictures of couples to pictures of people less happy in their relationship, with a transition slide of all of the words I could find synonymous with love and desire. In the second set of pictures, I tried to show people who were upset. Love isn’t always easy—in fact, it usually isn’t—and it can end in heartbreak. These people aren’t trying to pretend that things are ok, they are accepting that they aren’t happy, and that it has to end. They’ve decided to leave, unwilling to put up with the pain and the misery that love provides anymore, though still very much in love.

            The third set of pictures is meant to depict the paths people take—going with the song’s theme of running away. It reminded me a bit of The Bad Girl, in that every time she left, she took a different path to get to where she was going. In a few pictures, a person can actually be seen running along these paths. This set transitions into one showing that heartbreak doesn’t have to be dealt with alone. These people are dealing with their pain by walking with their friends, arm in arm, ready to face the world with support from the ones they love in a way that can be much stronger than romantic love: the love we have for our family—both the one we are born with, and the one we create with our best friends.

The video ends with those same people who were so upset in their relationships, now smiling, happy to be on their own. The project as a whole was made to show that we don’t need love to be happy. We can be just fine on our own, and feel complete with the platonic love we have for the people most present in our lives.