Erotic Themes Research Articles

The Social Construction of Homosexuality

F OUCAULT'S IDEA that even the deepest-lying sexual categories are social constructs has surely been one of the most powerful developments on the intellectual horizon in recent decades. It gives a path of explanation for much that was inexplicable; it liberates us from some of our own most mysterious values; it allows us to see things in other societies and ages that were simply overlooked before. It is an idea that has generated a cascade of work in ancient social history in the last few years, most notably from David Halperin, Froma Zeitlin, and the late John J. Winkler.' One of the most seductive claims to issue from this work is the claim that the very category homosexual is a social construct which is scarcely more than a hundred years old. This claim is made of course by Foucault himself, and is restated and defended with great clarity and vigour by David Halperin in his book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (above, note 1). This book has a number of essays on ancient erotic subjects; it would be pleasant to recount them and dilate on them here. But the book's most important and striking claim-its recurrent underlying thesis-is that homosexuality is not a natural but a social category. It is only this thesis, and Halperin's defence of it, that I shall consider in this review article.

The Realm of Venus Hadriani Barlandi [H. Beverland] De Prostibulis Veterum MS Leiden BPL 1994

AbstractDuring the summer of 1678, H. Beverland, a native of Zeeland, compiled the manuscript De Prostibulis Veterum. The work deals with all kinds of erotic subjects in literature from classical to his own times and is subdivided into 14 capita. Beverland rewrote the second chapter to form an autonomous booklet entitled Peccatum Originale, the first edition of which (1678) was put on sale anonymously. The second edition appeared with the author's name given in full on the title-page and shortly afterwards Beverland was arrested. The court demanded delivery of the manuscript treatise De Prostibulis Veterum and sentenced the author to exile. Beverland accepted the demand, but not until he had made a copy of it which he later first completed in England and then destroyed. The original passed via the heirs of Professor Spanheim to the University Library at Leiden where it still is at shelf-mark BPL 1994.

Love in Terence's Eunuch: The Origins of Erotic Subjectivity

Love in Terence's Eunuch: The Origins of Erotic Subjectivity

The Two Manners of Louis-Léopold Boilly and French Genre Painting in Transition

Louis Boilly's son noted that his father had worked in two distinct manners; the first during the 1790's and the second from the Consulate era onward. This article examines a selection from Boilly's genre oeuvre with a view toward defining the essential formal and iconographic characteristics. of each. It is suggested that Boilly is a transitional figure. Works in the first manner are typical of the later eighteenth century, with their interest in moral, sentimental, even mildly erotic themes. By contrast, Boilly's second manner anticipates developments in later nineteenth-century naturalism by evincing a strong desire to record daily life with a degree of objectivity.

Cavafy’s Sensual City: A Question

In his perceptive book, Cavafy’s Alexandria (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), Edmund Keeley describes how Cavafy’s major poetic preoccupation during the years 1911 to 1921 was the delineation of a mythical city called Alexandria and of the Greek, or Hellenic, way of life it represents. An essential element in this way of life is its erotic style, which is explicitly homosexual; and it is through his poems on erotic themes that Cavafy slowly and deliberately builds his image of Alexandria as the Sensual City. His method of doing this is particular. In depicting other features of his mythical city Cavafy locates his poems in that ancient Hellenistic world of which Alexandria was the centre. Most of his erotic poetry, on the other hand, speaks of episodes and relationships in contemporary Alexandria, the city in which Cavafy actually lived. Indeed, all the poetry which Cavafy wrote that is located in contemporary Alexandria deals with erotic themes to the exclusion of all others. And it is with the help of this poetry that Cavafy builds up his image.

Sex differences in response to erotica? Love versus lust.

The current research examined gender differences in response to varying erotic themes. In Experiment 1, unmarried male (n — 30) and female (n = 32) subjects viewed an erotic film portraying petting; this film was prefaced with instructional sets that established either a love theme (affectionate marital sex) or a lust theme (unemotional sex with a prostitute). In Experiment 2, 36 married couples viewed either a petting erotic film or one depicting coitus; these films were prefaced with instructional sets that established either the love or lust themes or a casual-sex theme (a chance sexual encounter). Arousal, affective, and evaluative responses to these stimuli were assessed. Results of Experiment 1 confirmed the effectiveness of the thematic manipulation and indicated that males and females were not differentially responsive to the love or lust themes along any of the response dimensions. Results of Experiment 2 replicated this finding and indicated that both men and women were more sexually aroused by the casual-sex theme than by those involving love or lust. Apparently, romantic or affectional emphasis is not a precondition for female arousal by erotica. Methodological and conceptual issues relating to the discrepancy between the often-cited female indifference to erotica and the present findings for equal male-female arousal responses are discussed.

Franz Kafka—His Father's Son

To the Editor.— I'd like to offer an alternate interpretation to N.Y. Hoffman's views of Franz Kafka's latent homosexuality and lack of erotic themes in his love letters in her otherwise excellent critique (229:1623, 1974). Max Brod, Kafka's lifelong friend and biographer, distinguishes between the introspective, pessimistic, and private Kafka of his diaries and works and the humorous, optimistic, and life-loving public man. Kafka often sent love and kisses to Brod in his letters. This is the public Jewish man speaking in Prague of the early 1900s. Brod indirectly comments on this only once, when he presents several Kafka letters with the general introit: They appear to me to be especially characteristic documents of a boundlessly rich spirit which never succumbed to routine or convention. In one letter Kafka states: This... is a kiss from me to you—in front of the whole populace. Regarding K's lack of erotic themes in

Eloquence of Pattern in Boccaccio's Tale of the Falcon

Walter Binni, in a commemorative essay on the critical writings and influence of Attilio Momigliano, declares that his commentary on the Decameron ha per sempre rotto l'immagine tradizionale del novellatore tematicamente e stilisticamente monotono e retorico (e ha impiantato, entro la salda immagine del Boccaccio poeta, la valutazione nuova dei temi tragicopassionali e del fondamentale tema della cortesia). 1 Binni's opinion would seem hard to contest: Italian critics, even the anti-Croceans, have been remarkably united in accepting Croce's rehabilitation of Boccaccio poeta and in rejecting as oversimple De Sanctis' reading of la commedia umana. Now, however, in Mimesis,2 surely one of the notable critical and scholarly works of our time, the late Erich Auerbach, magisterially aloof from this modern consensus, pronounces that Boccaccio succeeded with erotic themes only when the love was sensual and unproblematical; that when his themes were ideal or chivalric, or when they pointed toward the tragic and sublime, the unity of his style, with its realism and truth of feeling, was fatally disrupted. For all the brilliance, solidity and enthusiasm of Auerbach's analysis of Boccaccio's art prose, his demonstration of its originality and exploration of its resources, I think he is excessive in the limitations he imposes upon this style and upon its fathering sensibility. But I also find excesses and misplaced emphases in certain Crocean encomia of the tales of cortesia that Auerbach disparages. By offering a reading of one of the best-known of these tales, I shall try to make clear my own approach. The tale of Federigo degli Alberighi (Decameron, V, 9) seems a convenient choice because it has been memorably interpreted by Luigi Russo as well as Momigliano. While acknowledging the special debt owed these fine critics by every admirer of that side of Boccaccio dismissed by Auerbach, I believe that the latter's strictures can be more effectively met by an interpretation that emends their own. The tale is too familiar to need summarizing; and it is so brief that

LITERARY TECHNIQUES IN ‘LES BIJOUX INDISCRETS’

declared, for example, Abbe Raynal in theCorrespondance litteraire.1 The reason for this unfriendly reception is not far to seek. The novel belongs to a genre at that time very much in vogue, the rom~an galant oriental.2 This unexpected descendant of the Arabian Nights had as its chief progenitor Claude Prosper J olyot CrebiIlon, Crebillon fils. Pseudo-oriental in colouring, the works belonging to this genre were primarily fairy tales with a strong element of eroticism and an occasional dash of satire, and their essential quality was that 'tact dans l'audace' defined by Cocteau, which consists in knowing 'jusqu' ou on peut aIler trop loin'. Diderot reproduced most of these characteristics in the Bijoux indiscrets, but failed to observe the importance of the last one, with the result that his novel is coarse to the point of pornography. It has, nevertheless, one or two redeeming features, of interest to the literary historian. In the main, Diderot limits the elements of magic and Orientalism, and transforms his erotic subject into a satire of that age-old object of masculine scorn, women. But he gives his theme a new twist. Women, according to the Bijoux indiscrets, are fickle, but they cannot help it; it is their physiological make-up which is responsible. They are, in short, machines or 'automatons',3 whose behaviour is largely determined by the promptings of their sex-instinct. .This is a half-humorous extension of Descartes' theory of ~animal machines'i to human behaviour. Descartes had suggested that those aspects of animal behaviour which appear to be the effects of intelligence are simply mechanical responses to various stimuli: Diderot implies that the same is true of women. (He adds, generously, that 'les trois quarts des hommes are in the same case.) He does not explore the idea