Literature and Sexuality

Over the last 300 years, the concept of sexuality has gradually displaced soul, mind, and character as the most essential and salient ingredient in modern subjectivity, as the truth of the self. How has Western literature grappled with, embraced, or stubbornly resisted the sexualization of subjectivity? From Freud to Foucault, Venus in Furs to Story of O, D.H. Lawrence to Dennis Cooper, we map the uneasy alliance between and intertwining histories of literature and sexuality. The recorded lectures are from the 2011 Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course English 154. (4 credits)