Speaking the Unspeakable

Peter Michelson teaches in the English Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

• Preface A Note on Usage 1. The History of Sexuality and Poetics Liberalism and the Problem of ProblemsThe Covert History of PoeticsThe Proliferation of PerversitiesSpeaking the Unspeakable2. Pornographic Ways and Means De Vulgari and BeyondThe Beast with Two BacksSoft-Core SophistryConsciousness and Love's Body3. Decadence and the Poetics of Obscenity What You See Is What She GotBut What Do You See?With the Help of That Long Newspaper SpoonThere Is No Disputing Taste4. Unspeakable Moral Rhetorics Interrogating ConsensusVisions and Revisions5. An Unspeakably Tragic Ethos Toward Proliferating UncertaintiesVia the Sadistic Sublime6. The Anarchy Connection Regeneration and Orgiastic BeingWhere Straight and Gay Converge7. Comic Catharsis Amiable AnarchyHigh Affirmation and the Lowdown Truth8. Women and Pornorotica Asserting Sexual AutonomyDefinition and DialecticSoft-Core SentimentsInterrogation of Nature and Bourgeois LiberationMining the Hard-CoreClass Analysis and the Pornorotica DebateRadical Perverts and Pornorotic Pleasures9. Unspeakable Spectacle, the Movies What to Do with the BodyThe Avant-Garde Cinema of SexualityHard-Core Full BlownThe Dirty Little Secret Goes Pop10. Obscenity and the Unbearable Law of Liberalism Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty...WAP Versus FACTExpense of Spirit in a Waste of ShameBibliography

"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