Speak plainly and say fuck, prick, cunt, and ass

The history of modern pornography and the history of literature have always been closely related. Due to the success of visual media in pornography, this fundamental connection has been somewhat lost from view. Up to the present day, however, literature has been an important place from which the outlines of a cultural history of pornography can be sketched - beyond photography and film. At the same time, the question of what a literary language of pornography can (or even must) actually look like remains a subject of discussion. Theoretically, too, the potential of a literary pornography remains to be explored.

Based on such and similar observations, the panel discussion aims at a diagnosis of the present. In particular, it wants to fathom the topicality as well as the lines of tradition of contemporary literary stagings of the pornographic. To this end, it will explore the modes of writing, the narrative forms, the figurations, but also the political quality of the pornographic in literature. In this way, the discussion leads to the center of artistic as well as social debates.


Language German

With Birgit Nübel (literary scholar), Dorota Sajewska (cultural scholar) and Corinna T. Sievers (author)
Organization Shantala Hummler and Thomas Traupmann
in cooperation with Deutsches Seminar of the University of Zurich