James SteintragerAssociate Professor, English Interim Chair, English |
|
|
Research Interests |
18th-century Comparative Literature; Aesthetics; Ethical Philosophy and Literature; Systems Theory; Amatory and Erotic Fiction | |
|
Research Abstract |
My current book project The First Sexual Revolution: Libertines, License, and the Autonomy of Pleasure is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. While my material ranges from ancient Roman satire to 1950s-60s sexual-liberation talk in both high theory and popular media, my focus is the conjunction of radical materialist philosophy and libertinism in the 1740s through the French Revolution. My previous book Cruel Delight (Indiana UP, 2004) looked at the ethical construct of moral monstrosity and the uses of inhumanity in—among other things—Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, Hogarth’s engravings, early journalism, and the novels of the Marquis de Sade. I have also published on Hong Kong cinema, and am currently working on a project that brings together my theoretical (historical?) interests in the sociology of knowledge and the construction of “culture” in film. Other areas of interest include: Genroku literature, the history of literary criticism (particularly rhetoric and media studies—ancient to modern), satire, and systems theory. | |
|
Selected Publications: “Sentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible.” An American Voltaire: Studies in Honor of J. Patrick Lee, ed. E. Joe Johnson and Byron R. Wells (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009): 297-314. |
||
|
“What Happened to the Porn in Pornography? Rétif, Regulating Prostitution, and the History of Dirty Books.” Symposium 60.3 (Fall 2006): 189-204 |
||
| Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004). | ||
| "Liberating Sade." Yale Journal of Criticism 18.2 (2005): 351-379. | ||
| "An Unworthy Subject: Slaughter, Cannibalism, and Postcoloniality." Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Eds. Laikwan Pang and Day Wong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP. | ||
| “John Woo’s Bullet in the Head: Trauma, Identity and Violent Spectacle,” Chinese Films in Focus, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 2003). | ||
| “Jacques Lacan,” Postmodernism: The Key Figures, ed. Hans Berten and Joseph Natoli (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.) | ||
| “Monstrous Appearances: Hogarth’s ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ and the Paradox of Inhumanity,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42.1 (Spring, 2001). | ||
| “Are You There Yet? Libertinage and the Semantics of Orgasm.” differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11 (Summer 1999). | ||
| “Perfectly Inhuman: Moral Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Discourse.” Eighteenth Century Life 21, n.s. 2 (May 1997). | ||
| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=3345 | |
| Last updated | 11/21/2009 | |