Literature, Pornography, and Libertine Education

The objective of this article is not to write an apology for pornography, not because it is impossible to defend, but rather because it has been done so brilliantly by Susan Sontag in her seminal essay ‘‘The Pornographic Imagination’’. 1 The objective is to analyze a certain kind of literary pornography from both literary and psychological, here psychoanalytic, points of view. The term covers, basically, pictorial and literary representations of sexual activities. Literary pornography has been cultivated in drama, poetry, and prose fiction, whether short stories or novels. Furthermore, there are representations of sexual activities in the visual arts and literature considered great by any artistic standard, and then there is a tremendous lot of mere trash. Finally, pornography is not something given once and for all, but a designation used relative to the norms of a given group at a given time. Much of what our great‐grandparents, grandparents, and even our parents considered pornographic, seems to most of us today endowed with a certain innocence and sentimentality. To encompass all the facets of this subject in a single article is impossible. This essay considers a certain aspect of genre convention: pornography presented in a framework of education.