FREN 6780 - Libertinage and Perversion

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6765)

Spring. 4 credits.

This course co-meets with COML 4760/FREN 4760

T. McNulty.

In France, the emergence of libertine literature as a distinct genre coincides with political and philosophical debates about universalism, the rights of man, and equality. What do the first libertine writers have to tell us about the nature of the human subject and its relationship to the law or to the universal? What are their insights into human eroticism, the relation between the sexes, violence and power? How does libertine literature deal with the female subject, and how, if at all, does the genre change in the hands of female authors? Those questions will lead to a theoretical examination of the relationship between libertinage and the psychic structure of perversion (sadism, masochism, fetishism) understood as a contestation of the late or signifier and its castrating effects. Works by such authors as Sade, Casanova, Lautréamont, Sacher-Masoch, Rachides, Bataille and Réage will be read alongside critical texts by Freud, Deleuxe, Butler, Barthes, and others.