Sexuality and Literature

Welcome to the Sexuality and Literature page. Here you'll be able to access all the materials of the course. The only required reading are the five novels and the Foucault. The rest of the readings, movies, and so on are for your enjoyment.

The Novels

Below are the five novels that make up the course. To the right of a "famous" quote from the novel, you'll find a button that will take you to the novel itself in .pdf form and a button that will take you to a resource page.

Lolita by Vladamir Nabokov

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

$19.55

The Story of O

"A man in love ... is the master, so it seems, but only if his lady friend permits it! The need to interchange the roles of slave and master for the sake of the relationship is never more clearly demonstrated than in the course of an affair. Never is the complicity between victim and executioner more essential. Even chained, down on her knees, begging for mercy, it is the woman, finally, who is in command ... the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master's heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure.” ― Pauline Réage, The Story of O

$19.54

Naked Lunch

“He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells...” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

$19.59

The Rainbow

"I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me, as I have perished on her.

$19.15

Oryx and Crake

"The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is." So?" So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.” ― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

$20.03

Fun Stuff

From time to time, fun things will come up that have a general, rather than novel specific appeal. I'll park them here.

A Little Blashpemy for You

I got sucked in by the Twain quote at the top of the page: "Thou hast played the whore also with the Assyrians, because thou wast unsatiable; yea, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet couldest not be satisfied.--Ezekiel 16:28 It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. -- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth" The annotations are lacking subtlety and nuance, but they can be fun.

Priceless?

1950s Discourse on Sexuality

Perhaps the dictionary definition of the overuse of "discourse" in cultural studies, this is a brief, well-written piece on the conflicted space of sexuality in the 1950s.

$20.13