...Marisa Anne Pagnattaro w Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and U ly sse s Marisa Anne Pagnattaro What did I tell you? raged Quinn. You’re damned fools trying to get away with such a thing as “Ulysses” in this puritan-ridden...

..., then, many feminists reworked its characteristic postures. And with the fragmentation of early radical feminism, it was antipornography campaigns that seemed to offer a way out of this self-defeating impasse. Where Grove deployed antihumanist obscenity to blur the distinction between its imagined audience...

... to the 1960s, when the press achieved its greatest success and notoriety as a publisher of avant-garde and obscene literature. Its authors, to name just a few, included Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Kenzaburō Ōe, Harold Pinter, and Frantz Fanon. Focusing on these two...

... exerted influence over the production, distribution, and reception of literary texts. These groups of­ ten brought suspect literary works to the attention of the British Home Office, which, after the Obscene Publications (Campbell) Act of 1857, was empowered to seize and destroy all copies...

... on at least two levels: one, the explicit treatment of sexuality frequently provoked the intervention of the state, which resulted in some famous obscenity trials; two, displacement and condensation became literary techniques for the realistic representation of sexual themes, making cen...

... in agreement that what Burroughs had to say should not be said. Thus the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that finally cleared Naked Lunch of obscenity charges on appeal in 1966 was a license to speak. In the space of three and a half years the unspeakable had become speakable.2 Moreover...

..., the so-called Hicklin test was devised by the courts to demarcate the boundaries of obscene discourse. As summarized by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, the Hicklin test used the following principal: “where a man publishes a work manifestly obscene, he must be taken to have 228 Pornography...

... in terms of the era’s underground presses, the subversive public performances of radical groups like the Yippies, and the free speech movement. The book does particularly well to note this last context, reminding us how rapidly obscenity laws were changing during this period and how extreme...

... as a man of contra­ dictions: vulgar yet elegant, self-conscious yet confident, stuttering yet articulate. His behavior, too, sometimes seemed contradictory, even hypo­ critical. As a critic he was quick to denounce obscenity, and yet some of his own works were judged obscene by others...

... collection The Love Book (1966) (subject of an obscenity trial in San Francisco) and Troia: Mexican Memoirs (1969) by Bonnie Bremser. The diversity of the expanded Beat canon forms the basis for a set of strong chapters (with Ronna C. Johnson on gender, Polina Mackay on sexuality, and A. Robert Lee...

... conformity and what the doctor calls a “legend” (15) that undoes it, a legend at once familiar and yet utterly strange.18 Barnes parodies the tendency of historical narration to domesticate its subjects, to read every empty spot as an obscenity over which it has to write polite euphemisms...

... obscenity” (quoted in Cline 1997 : 262). Rachel thus comes to knowledge of homosexuality through the language of shame, the language of the courts, rather than through the language of innocence, that of The Well . Rachel’s loss of innocence is therefore less about supporting her friend Margaret’s right...

... 1952 and 1954 respectively). Kenneth Koch remembered that “Easter” “burst on us all like a bomb.” It was, he remembered, “a won- derful, energetic, and rather obscene poem of four or five pages, which consisted mainly of a procession of various bodily parts and other ob- jects across a vast...

... fashioning of the body of the star, Hollywood cinema thus disavows bodily abjection and renders it obscene (literally off-scene or off-screen), thanks in no small part to the effects of continuity editing, which typically succeeds in obscuring this construction process. Thus continuity does not work...

... incarceration, Burroughs appealed to the reader’s preconditioned response to abnormality. The public outcry against not only Burroughs’s most “obscene” work, Naked Lunch, but against Burroughs himself was due in large part to his extratextual claims triggering a mode of reading already appealing...

..., “v,” published several years later, which generates its 112 iambic pentameter rhyming quatrains with a mixture of standard English, Leeds dialect, and an assortment of repelling epithets and obscenities. I will show how the poem confronts social stratification by depicting in traditional poetic form...

... Thayer, and the Dial.” 48.4 (2002): 487-506 Parker, Emma. “A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." 47A (2001): 1-19 Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Stan­ dard and Ulysses.” 47.2 (2001): 217-240 Pickard, Zachariah...

... altogether. Beyond the dots, the lines, the curves, the circles, the squares, the numbers, and other figures on the page, there persists a wish and a demand, bestowing on graphic denotation the import of something excessive, something obscene. It is in this regard that we may (to be playful) say...

... knocked on her door earlier in the week, in his “beautiful dressing-gown, immaculately white, with long wide, hanging sleeves. ] He looks like a priest, the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion” (35). Sasha asks him what he wants but he only repeats “nothing” and continues...

..., “took place within comprehensible parameters” (9). The war’s obscene motives, irrational military tactics, and individual acts of heroism allow for, even invite, discussions of various kinds in historical texts and literary works. Recall Krebs in Heming- way’s “Soldier’s Home” who returns...