Literary Pleasure (ENGL40010)

This subject examines the uses and abuses of literary pleasure, considering it as a category of analysis that develops from the eighteenth century with the emergence of literature as an institution and disciplinary formation. Through a series of literary, theoretical and critical readings, students analyse the singularity of literary pleasure, whilst engaging it in its institutional, economic, social, affective and corporeal locations. The subject introduces students to current debates in literary aesthetics that engage the fraught relations between pleasure and value. Students trace these debates historically, moving from Edmund Burke's vocabulary of aesthetic affect, Kant's "castrated hedonism", and eighteenth-century writings on the dangerous pleasures of novel-reading, through nineteenth-century art-for-art's-sake theories, utilitarianism and late Victorian 'New Hedonism', to Marxist and social practice accounts of literary value, and contemporary queer theory. Many influential theories have been notoriously unable to account for the specific forms and values of literary pleasure: asking why is a key focus of the subject.