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Pornographic Imagination

By Library1 min read

Pornographic Imagination

by Susan Sontag

In “The Pornographic Imagination”, a groundbreaking essay which attempted to define and understand the genre of pornography, Susan Sontag isolates the vignette structure as the de facto narratological gesture of porn in writing:

“The books generally called pornographic are those whose primary, exclusive, and overriding preoccupation is with the depiction of sexual ‘intentions’ and ‘activities.’ […] Pornography uses a small crude vocabulary of feeling, all relating to the prospects of action: feeling one would like to act (lust); feeling one would not like to act (shame, fear, aversion). There are no gratuitous or non-functioning feelings; no musings, whether speculative or imagistic, which are irrelevant to the buisiness at hand. Thus, the pornographic imagination inhabits a universe that is, however, repetitive the incidents occurring within it, incomparably economical. The strictest possible criterion of relevance applies: everything must bear upon the erotic situation.” Good Reads – (Styles of Radical Will, 66)

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