more extensive and unaffected pleasure

[lotesse]

Why, when discussing eighteenth-nineteenth(twentieth-)century anti-novel rhetoric, does no one address the discursive parallels with injunctions against onanism/masturbation? (and does anyone know of a book that does? because I would totally read that book.)

Comments

[executrix]

hi, lotesseflower! I think that's a pretty fair description of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's controversial essay, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl."

[lotesse]

YES. God, it's clearly been too long, that one had fallen out of my head. But it's such a widespread trope, one that's been written on so much - how can that essay still be controversial?! it is to boggle.

[executrix]

Yeah, but a lot of people with control over funding don't think that students should ever be exposed to any mention of sexuality other than post-marital procreationi.

And don't forget Rev. Mr. Podsnap's concern about reading that might "bring a blush to the cheek of a young person" and Trollope's boast that he did not think any girl had lost any of her purity by reading his books--I mean, if you ask yourself just what they were worried about.

[lotesse]

Right?! and bloody bugger funding, anyway.

[mecurtin]

Off to find a copy!

[ineptshieldmaid]

... That's Sedgwick? I have a copy hanging around on my computer, but the file name doesn't have author attribution in it and I'd been thinking it was some weird bit of fan studies or something.

MUST READ. AT ONCE.

[ithiliana]

Ha ha! It is! AHAHAHAHAH!

Well, sort of. I certainly think of her as a fangirl.

*ducks*

[ithiliana]

And I lose for not using this icon above...

[ineptshieldmaid]

Well, yes, but better Sedgwick than Catherine Driscoll!

[ithiliana]

Hadn't heard of Driscoll before now, although my general rule is "better Sedgwick than just about 99% of everybody else, WOOTZ*. Why yes, I tend toward fangirlishness my own self!

[ineptshieldmaid]

Driscoll is... not too bad, really. I just have METHODOLOGY ISSUES. I prefer my acafen to be literary scholars or historians, and I have ISSUES with cultural theory. Driscoll's article 'The pornography of romance and the romance of pornography' is rooly rooly interesting but she *doesn't cite things*. She keeps telling me things I know - like, say, fanfiction crosses the genre boundaries of romance and pornography - but NOT GIVING ME CITATIONS. I know it's true, but I still want to see her working!

[ithiliana]

p.s. OMG, great icon!!!!!!

[ineptshieldmaid]

:D thank you!

[oursin]

That article would be even more compelling if Sedgwick had actually cited texts contemporary with Jane Austen - what annoys me (being a historian, not a lit person) about that piece is that she picks on French texts from decades later rather than someone like e.g. Beddoes.