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Date/Time
Date(s) - 23 Feb 2016
6:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Location
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò

Category(ies) No Categories


TANGENTS OF DESIRE

A lecture by Carla Freccero (UC Santa Cruz)

Introduced by Jane Tylus (NYU)

6 pm

Casa Italiana

24 West 12th St

Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early modern prose, especially those elements that could be said to convey affect, tone, emotion, desire? What does it do with lyric’s indeterminate rhetoricity? Through the figure of touch and the contingencies of the tangent, this paper explores textual instances in early modern continental literature where reading poses problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved into determinate meaning and that raise the question of how to “read” what moderns call “desire,” especially queer desire, in early modern poetry and prose. François Rabelais’s inscription of woman as writing, the tortuous fashioning of the lyric I as it travels between Petrarch and Louise Labé and the sparing narrative of Marguerite de Navarre bear fragmentary traces of what moderns might call a queer feminist archive, and yet none yield positive (or empirical) “knowledge” about gendered and sexual practices and subjectivities. Rather, they inscribe modalities of desire that challenge scholars of sexuality to attend to the excess and indeterminacy that eludes efforts to capture and “represent” objects of knowledge, whether “early” or “modern.”

In ENGLISH.

Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where she has been teaching since 1991. She has published on early modern literature and culture; US popular culture; the history of sexuality; feminism and queer theory. She’s the author of Father Figures (Cornell 1991); Popular Culture(NYU 1999); Queer/Early/Modern (Duke 2006); and the co-editor of Premodern Sexualities (Routledge 1996) and special issues of American Quarterly (“Species/Race/Sex”) and Yale French Studies (“Animots”). She is currently working on a book titled Animal Inscription, on animality and metaphor.