Course Description
This course comprises three parts. The first part is the reading of, along with Freud’s articles on femininity, Lacan’s Seminar XX On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Knowledge and Love, with emphasis being put on how sexual difference influences subjectivity, knowledge and love, and how a subject-to-subject relationship can be fostered and maintained. In the second part, in light of Lacan’s theory the following question is asked apropos of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice: If, as Lacan insists, phallic love is narcissistic, how does Austen manage to create a convincing love story? And in the third part, there are Alice Munro’s four short stories. The first three stories show how the women characters created by the profoundly subtle feminist writer cope with three different types of male lovers. The fourth story presents a male lover endowed with what Lacan calls “feminine jouissance” and the linguistic and mnemonic traits characteristic of this type of sexuality.