[lbo-talk] RE: Theory of Porn

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Feb 2 10:34:25 PST 2004


joanna bujes wrote:
>
> "Does anyone know if there is a coincidence of Bentham's (1748-1832)
> panopticon writings and the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Porn was invented
> in the era after Sade (according to Lynn Hunt)


> Porn invented in the nineteenth century? I seriously doubt this.

I had never heard of Lynn Hunt, but I googled her and came up with the following. That's a pretty impressive CV, and I wouldn't argue with her (if she made this claim) without knowing an awful lot more than I do.

While most of us most of the time would probably call _Fanny Hill_ pornography, there is certainly a huge gulf between it and the flood of pornography created during the Victorian period. - Carrol


>From the UCLA web site on Lynn Hunt:

Born in Panama and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, she has her B.A. from Carleton College (1967) and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University. Before coming to UCLA she taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1987-1998) and the University of California, Berkeley (1974-1987).

Prof. Hunt teaches French and European history and the history of history as an academic discipline. Her specialties include the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. Her current research projects include an examination of the origins of human rights in the 18th century and a study with Margaret Jacob on British romantics and their links to science and politics.

Prof. Hunt has written extensively on the French Revolution: Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978); Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984); and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992). She has also written about historical method and epistemology: The New Cultural History (1989); with Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994); with Jacques Revel, Histories: French Constructions of the Past (1995); and with Victoria Bonnell, Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999). In addition, she has edited collections on the history of eroticism, pornography, and on human rights; published a western civilization textbook; and prepared and translated a collection of documents on human rights and the French Revolution. Her books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese and Polish.

Her most recent publication (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) is a textbook co-authored with Jack Censer. It includes a cd-rom developed by a group of scholars and media experts in New York and Washington D.C. with the help of a grant from the NEH. The cd-rom includes hundreds of original images, English translations of hundreds of key documents, songs, maps, and multi-media overviews.

Lynn Hunt was President of the American Historical Association in 2002.



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