...Marisa Anne Pagnattaro Copyright © Hofstra University 2001 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...

... the unionization drive and feminist protest occupation of Grove in 1970. Copyright © 2018 Hofstra University 2018 Barney Rosset critical theory Henry Miller history of the book obscenity Between its founding in 1951 and its labor crisis in 1970, Grove Press stood at the epicenter of...

... 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 of a...

... 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...

... 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...

... 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...

... 1966-1971 composition 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...

.... (1) As Lafourcade suggests, Bennett was also perceived 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...

... titles such as Lenore Kandel’s poetry 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...

..., Scofield 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...

... 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. It is with the empty spot that we might see Barnes aligned with Benjamin: both emphasize that part of the past is...

...-American. This at least is the case in early and provocatively “wild” poems such as “Easter” and “In the Movies” (dated 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...

...). Unfortunately, the ambivalence of identity can sometimes pose an obstacle to interpretation as much as it generates dramatic power. Among Kenneth Koch’s papers at the New York Public Library, Epstein discovered a poem titled “Finding Leroi a Lawyer,” referring to obscenity charges that were lodged...

... approbation, and even 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...

..., “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 to...

... 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 solely to fashion the pieces of celluloid on which the star’s image is...

... of something excessive, something obscene. It is in this regard that we may (to be playful) say that the appearance of scientific graphicity in postmodern theory is, ultimately, graphic. To put it differently, the graphic figures serve in effect as a little theater where the unresolved...

...-called atom spies: “Rosenbergs are pathetic, gov­ ernment Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion ma­ chine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror” (Ginsberg, As Ever 150). Since the copyboy was Allen Ginsberg and the...

... towards fictional abstraction, but instead towards uncovering the abjected, degraded, obscene and discarded forms of materiality, especially the materiality of variously abused bodies that form the exploited flipside to late-capitalist fantasies of discursive or technological transcendence...