Text and Desire: A Literary Journey through the Senses

To set the tone for our exploration, we will start with the unique writings by Anaïs Nin, and follow her search for the language of “woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate.” Nin, who believed “the language of the senses was yet to be discovered,” writes for the senses, and we will try to feel with her. If she describes a scene, try to visualize it; if she describes a painting or a piece of music, pause and look it up.

We will then explore desire and longing in a historical context: together we will decide whether we are going to read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier (or perhaps we can find a way to read both).

We will then move to a more perverse and imposing text, Lolita by Nabokov. We will explore Nabokov’s mastery over the text, and the traps he sets for the readers, while criticizing the sexist aspects of this exhibitionist mastery.

Staying with troubling themes, we will then move to Othello but read the text through the lens of desire. Here we can begin to see how race and racism, but also other dominant ideological formations, condition how we feel.

And finally, we will turn to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, not only because of its strong erotic content but more importantly because it explores desire which escapes meaning, , desire that exceeds the tenable, and desire in misrecognition —and through its pitfalls exposes the author’s desire for recognition which at times undermines an otherwise magnificent text.