NB: I wound up with separate files for the readings and notes–and a strangely giant notes file–due to circumstances beyond my control.
Links to readings removed. Contact me if you need them.
The “theory” reading for Th, 4/10 is by Niklas Luhmann. He is a German sociological theorist, whose central foci are systems theory and communication theory–which means that he approaches things very differently from the French (philosophical-literary) theorists and Anglo-American historians and critics we in English studies are used to. I have hewed the pdf of readings from his book so as to emphasize his historical commentary/argument, but I warn you that I am doing this against the grain of Luhmann’s own approach and intentions. So much should be obvious, perhaps, from the discontinuous page numbers. These come because he regularly moves between historical musings and sociological theorizing in a broader mode. Wikipedia has a seemingly trustworthy intellectual bio of Luhmann.
Luhmann’s book, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy is (luckily) available and searchable from google books and also from amazon.com. But both allow only limited usage.
Be warned that your usage of the book on either site is in a very limited preview mode. The best way to use this is to search for something specific, such as a phrase that Luhmann may have previously explained or defined which has you flummoxed. If one locks you out, try the other. Both, I believe, let you look through the index freely.
The Harvard UP and Stanford UP press web sites each list the book with useful blurbs and summaries. Harvard is more worthwhile because their blurb tries to give an overview of the book.
