Tangents of Desire

A lecture by Carla Freccero of UC Santa Cruz on feminist and queer approahces to Rabelais, Petrach, Marguerite de Navarre and others. From Casas Italiana:

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.