A fresh historical perspective on the transformative relationship between sexuality and the arts around 1968

Translator's Note
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Stories of Ars and Eros
The Relation the Parts of This Book: Liaisons stimulantes
Part I. The Aesthetic Ambitions of Sexual Theories
Introduction to Part I
1. Literature as an Aid for Sexual Liberation: Wilhelm Reich's Art of Manipulation
2. Literature as an Attractive Reminder of a Pleasurable Future: The Orientation of the New Sexuality towards Art in the Work of Herbert Marcuse
3. Sex Front, or The Ironic Art of Enlightenment: Sexuality as Pop Art
Conclusion to Part I
Part II. Sexual Obsessions in Aesthetics
Introduction to Part II
4. Stimulating Dissolution of Boundaries: The Literary History of the Obscene and Ludwig Marcuse's Program of Writing "Without a Safety Helmet"
5. Art or Pornography? For and Against Contemporary Literature in the "Zurich Literature Controversy"
6. Exclusive vs Popularizing Dissolution of Boundaries: Pro-pornography as a Model Example of Extreme Literature (Susan Sontag) or of Mass Culture (Leslie A. Fiedler)
7. Potentiated Dialectics: The Obscene as a Formal Principle of Anti-Pornographic Art in the Work of Peter Gorsen
8. The Orgasm as a Model of Aesthetic Experience and the Masochistic Pleasure of Modern Art in the Work of Theodor W. Adorno
9. "Le plaisir en pièces; la langue en pièces": Erotic Fragments of a Theory of Textual Eroticism in the Work of Roland Barthes
Conclusion to Part II
Bibliography
Index

CHRISTINE WEDER is Professor in Modern German Literature at the University of Geneva.