Abstract
This essay reads John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure within a long history of "doing things with words," including Cleland's own eccentric contributions to enlightenment philology and our contemporary debates about pornography quickened by speech act theory. Much of Fanny's vexation over the signifying potency of language anticipates Cleland's later attempts to reclaim the originary "energy" that links words to things. Cleland's Dictionary of Love, The Way to Things by Words , and other etymological tracts serve to reframe Memoirs as a curious meditation on sense-making, and a crucial text in ongoing deliberations on pornographic thought and action.
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