Five works of porn literature I read with my students

We are a literature class. When most of the other classrooms and their green boards (yes, blackboards are mostly green these days) are crammed with graphs, equations or accountancy problems with the underlying promise of high paying jobs or endless opportunities, we offer no such promises in our talks about repression, sexuality, desire or class. Homoeroticism, fetishism, transgression, pornography - words from a literature class have a different ring to them. Probably because every single day the classroom with its varied background of students and teachers like me are confronted with ideas we know are the only things that can make the world a saner place. Or more desirable for that matter.

We discuss role playing with Cleopatra donning Antony's daggers and role in bed in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and we discuss how the age of repression in literature, the Victorian period, saw the proliferation of literature and writings about sex, sexuality, as seen in journals like Pearl: A magazine of facetious and voluptuous reading 1879-1880. Our normal days, even when there is no public discourse around pornography, following the effects of banning and revoking, are often spent in conversations and discussions around morality, prohibition and censorship. When we read modernism or DH Lawrence, we never fail to talk about censorship and the banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover and the long historical debate about what is erotic or what is pornographic.

While the erotic is an element in literature or writing derived from the eros (in psychoanalysis, sex or the life instinct is opposed to thanatos, the death instinct) pornographic is about representation and legality and which has a significant body of literature about its history, debates and development. Pornography in literature is a topic beyond the scope of space or time here. Pornographic visuals, which have their own economy of consumption, distribution and imagination (or the lack of it) must exist in a society already burdened with repressive mechanisms like the texts of literature which have been accused of replacing the erotic with pornographic, an idea which can never quite be clearly understood. In such a moment it is exciting just to remind ourselves, reading literature simply put is political, subversive, equal and absolutely erotic and puts most things including desire, eroticism and sexuality and prohibition in their context and history. Eroticism, after all, as an element in writing is also a perspective. So some of these books are worth re-reading where desire challenges the demands of propriety, expression and morality.

Decameron (1353), by Giovanni Boccaccio

Written in Italian, Decameron is a string of witty tales told by a group of three men and seven women around their sexual activity and escapades as they are caught together fleeing from the great Plague in Florence. An interesting study of wit, lust, trickery and pleasure framed through the stories shared by each protagonist.

Fanny Hill (1748), by John Cleland

Often considered the earliest erotic prose pornography that emerges with the new form, the novel. The book became popular both in the UK and US, also bringing about multiple bans and court cases against the author. Fanny Hill was composed as a series of letters written by the protagonist taking the reader into a journey into her life from the age of 15 to her sexual choices and path of life as a prostitute.

Justine: the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) and 120 days of Sodom, by Marquis de Sade

Marquis de Sade is the most famous aberrant. He questioned everything about normativity, fantasy and desire at that time. His writings combine philosophy and sexual fantasy and were seen as blasphemous by the Church. His libertine novels challenge dominant ideas of religion, heterosexuality, politics and gender.

The story is about young Justine and her path towards virtue and the questions that arise out of it. Sadism, as we all know, is derived from the philosophy of Sade.

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), by DH Lawrence

It is one of the books all literature students read right in their early years to understand the debate around censorship, obscenity and art. Constance an upper class woman and her sexual relationship with her gamekeeper, this novel probes more into class using sex as an element. Interestingly, the book written about the famous public obscenity trial against Penguin books, was also banned.

Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller

Set in France, the story is of a struggling writer and his everyday being and anguish punctured with his poetic sexual encounters. Banned from import to the US, even when it was later published, over 60 obscenity lawsuits were filed in 21 states.

Ada or Ardor (1969), by Vladimir Nabokov

Challenging the norms of forbidden sex within the realm of family and incest, Nabokov tells a story of a man and his lifelong fascination and affair with his sister Ada. The novel is divided in five parts and through five periods in history.

Delta of Venus (1977), by Anais Nin - Published posthumously

It is a poetic set of 14 short stories written as private erotica for someone called the "Collector". Not just about female sexuality, Nin explores masculinity, love, dominance in a language that plunges the reader into sexual experiences of literary brilliance.

Swimming Pool Library (1988), by Allan Hollinghurst

Beautiful, sensuous writing about a young man, Will, his encounter with an older man whose life he saves that sets forth a chain of events. The story travels into men, promiscuity and their secret sexual encounters and the metaphor of illicit literature and exchange.

I do not mention the recent Fifty Shades of Grey here as it is classified as fan fiction, and also not having read it yet. But then as it is said in the case of pornography or erotic writing, as good literature students and teachers, we all have our fantasies written privately or waiting to be written, making the list endless.