Transforming Desire

Download or read book Transforming Desire written by Lauren Silberman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Faerie Queene anticipates postmodernist concerns with destabilizing language, and Lauren Silberman's stimulating study of Books III and IV of the poem proceeds from the assumption that Spenser has something important to say to us in the late twentieth century. In these books, Spenser exposes fictions of total control for what they are—fictions. The text affirms the value of risk and improvisation over the temptation to seek guarantees. The books examine the role of desire in moving us to function in an uncertain world and tempting us to foreclose that uncertainty by strategies that seek to frame knowledge through total mastery of it.