Speaking the Unspeakable by Peter Michelson

A study of the literary and cinematic uses of pornography, developing a poetics of obscenity in French, British and American art since the eighteenth century. Michelson discusses writers including Radclyffe Hall, Edith Wharton, Anaïs Nin, Pauline Réage, Erica Jong, John Cleland, the Marquis de Sade, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Henry Miller, and filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith and Bernardo Bertolucci, arguing that speaking the unspeakable is pornography's principal aesthetic function.