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This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography since the eighteenth century. Discussing female literary figures including Hall, Wharton, Nin, "Reage," Jong, and Shulman; such men as Cleland, Sade, Beardsley, Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller; and film makers such as Brakhage, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Bertolucci, Oshima, and Wertmuller; Michelson analyzes both the use of aesthetic pornography and the philosophical, cultural, and legal implications of its use. He proposes that realizing the obscene -in the sense of speaking the unspeakable- is the principle aesthetic function of pornography.
"This book goes far beyond the limited implications of the free-speech arguments typically used in support of pornography and erotica. It convincingly argues for the profound, even if sometimes demonic, values of pornography and erotica in the context of literary studies, cultural practices, and philosophical discourse. It is well argued and well researched, avoiding both the polemical excesses and the technical jargon that mar so much current discourse on the topic. Its theoretical openness permits often striking leaps of the imagination and far-reaching apercus which might otherwise have been lost under the weight of a more rigid technical machinery." — Allen S. Weiss, New York University
Preface
A Note on Usage
1. The History of Sexuality and Poetics
Liberalism and the Problem of Problems
The Covert History of Poetics
The Proliferation of Perversities
Speaking the Unspeakable
2. Pornographic Ways and Means
De Vulgari and Beyond
The Beast with Two Backs
Soft-Core Sophistry
Consciousness and Love's Body
3. Decadence and the Poetics of Obscenity
What You See Is What She Got
But What Do You See?
With the Help of That Long Newspaper Spoon
There Is No Disputing Taste
4. Unspeakable Moral Rhetorics
Interrogating Consensus
Visions and Revisions
5. An Unspeakably Tragic Ethos
Toward Proliferating Uncertainties
Via the Sadistic Sublime
6. The Anarchy Connection
Regeneration and Orgiastic Being
Where Straight and Gay Converge
7. Comic Catharsis
Amiable Anarchy
High Affirmation and the Lowdown Truth
8. Women and Pornorotica
Asserting Sexual Autonomy
Definition and Dialectic
Soft-Core Sentiments
Interrogation of Nature and Bourgeois Liberation
Mining the Hard-Core
Class Analysis and the Pornorotica Debate
Radical Perverts and Pornorotic Pleasures
9. Unspeakable Spectacle, the Movies
What to Do with the Body
The Avant-Garde Cinema of Sexuality
Hard-Core Full Blown
The Dirty Little Secret Goes Pop
10. Obscenity and the Unbearable Law of Liberalism
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty...
WAP Versus FACT
Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame
Bibliography