French Literature Reviews - 2026
Sébastien Hubier, Fictions excitantes
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
For contemporary hypocrites, pornography has a bad reputation. Yet sex is everywhere today, and its ubiquitous representation is the defining phenomenon of our hypermodern era. A major phenomenon indeed, but also the most contradictory, for sex is ultimately both totem and taboo: something everyone relishes, yet socially agrees not to speak of, except in jokes.
This book focuses on fictions that stage (and provoke) sexual desire, in order to gauge its significance, interpret its meanings, articulate its pleasures, and point out its flaws. Examining literature (Sade, Louÿs, Calaferte, Esparbec) and the fine arts (from Giulio Romano to Jennifer Lacey and Nadia Lauro) as well as mass and entertainment arts (fashion, advertisements and commercials, comic books, graphic novels, online videos, and rock music), this essay jointly adopts three perspectives to understand why arousing fictions hold such a prominent place in our cultures, and why, from ancient frescoes to online porn, sex has gradually become a spectacle.
Challenging normative and essentialist approaches, this triple perspective—anthropological, psychological, and culturalist—is alone capable of capturing the extent to which pornography is an ideological construction reflecting the macrosociological transformations that have helped normalize the depiction of sexuality.
Analytical Table of Contents
How to Read Arousing Fictions by Gabriel Tremblay-Gaudette (p. 9).
Polemical Preliminaries
A crisis of literary studies in France, but no crisis of fiction (pp. 15–24). A possible renewal in the study of fictional immersion thanks to cultural studies (pp. 24–30), of which Anglo-American porn studies have become a major branch (p. 30), aiming to analyze the various forms of "arousing fictions" (pp. 30–33). The latter are currently experiencing an unprecedented vogue in diverse forms (pp. 33–34).
First Attempts at a Typology
The difference between erotica and pornography is subtler than commonly believed (pp. 34–36). Definitions of these two registers are multiple (p. 37) and historically variable (pp. 37–42), as illustrated by the examples of Pierre Louÿs and Louis Calaferte (pp. 42–44).
A Mechanics of Women
Calafertean fiction draws upon numerous tópoï from the European erotic-pornographic tradition (pp. 44–46) and blends male and female voices and gazes (p. 46), leading to a strange poetization of coital triviality (pp. 46–49). This epiphanic and ejaculatory logic suspends the passage of time (pp. 49–51) but corresponds above all to a sexual heuristic (pp. 51–53), which sheds light on the importance of the reification of women in arousing fictions (pp. 53–55) from a dual psychological and anthropological perspective (p. 55). Thus emerges an erotization of ugliness (pp. 56–60), which can be analyzed using notions and concepts forged by Bataille and largely reworked by postmodern and afterpop thought (pp. 60–62).
Transgression and Arousal
The importance assigned to transgression suggests that arousal is not merely biological but also shaped by the sociocultural context specific to each individual (pp. 62–65). Arousing fictions unfold mentally as if they were real (pp. 65–66), and pornography represents a form of utopia (p. 66)—a notion already championed in the 18th century (pp. 66–69) and further amplified by post- and hypermodernities (pp. 69–71). It is defined by the principle of maximal visibility, which drives the recurrence of meatshots and cumshots (pp. 71–75). This culminates in both pro-am gonzo and amateur porn (pp. 75–78). Controversies abound, pitting those who view pornography as a potential emancipation against those who see in it only a source of alienation (p. 78). Hence the relevance of the concepts of "male gaze" and "female gaze" (p. 78) in grasping the stakes of contemporary porn, which is no longer reserved for men (pp. 78–80). An evolution has indeed occurred under the dual influence of the internet (p. 80) and managed consumer society (pp. 80–86). Pornography is now everywhere: sextoys, video games, TV shows, and even mainstream films (pp. 86–99). Within this framework, "fragmentary porn"—of which Gaspar Noé’s Love is perhaps the best example—holds significant importance (pp. 99–102). Yet these stakes of contemporary porn can only be understood by taking into account the extremely long history of arousing fictions (pp. 102–104).
Antique Porn
There is not one Antiquity, but many antiquities; it is fascinating, for instance, to compare today's modes of representing sexuality with those that prevailed in pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt (p. 105). An organization of pornography strangely both very close to and very different from our own (pp. 105–106), found among Romans and Greeks alike (p. 106) as well as Etruscans (p. 107), but gradually altered by Christian ideas starting at the turn of the 2nd and 3rd centuries—for a long time to come (p. 108).
The Middle Ages: A Long Era Without Porn?
A long and polymorphous period (p. 109) in which sexual transgression primarily concerns the "lower bodily stratum" (p. 109). Hence the need to distinguish erotica, scatology, bawdiness, and pornography to understand how and why arousing fictions established a series of binary oppositions between high and low, inside-out and right-side-up, erudite and popular, licit and illicit, sacred and profane, front and back, emission and reception, body and flesh, clean and dirty, odor and image (p. 110). Animalcity assumes a central importance during this time (pp. 110–112), leaving traces in distorted forms within sexual fictions, and not solely in the West (pp. 112–114).
Hot Renaissance
The epistemological absurdity of century-by-century slicing (p. 114). Nonetheless, the 15th and 16th centuries constitute a major milestone in the conception and dissemination of pornography, largely due to the invention of printing and woodcut engraving (pp. 114–115). Furthermore, works appeared that would long serve as models for Western arousing fictions, both in their texts and illustrations: I Modi, Sonetti lussuriosi, Della Qualità del buon marito (pp. 115–116). However, in the spirit of the age, the body was generally devalued (pp. 116–117), making it seem anachronistic to speak of pornography in the context of early modernity (p. 117). One must wait until the 17th century for lubricity and the genital act to be clearly staged with the aim of sexually arousing male and female readers (pp. 117–120).
Classical Rigors
The posthumous importance of the Council of Trent, which explicitly defined what must be prohibited regarding licentious fiction (p. 120). However, Tridentine canons did not spread uniformly across all Catholic countries (pp. 120–121). France stands out as a unique case within Baroque Europe, establishing a markedly different form of censorship (pp. 121–122) that incidentally attributed moral and legal responsibility to authors (p. 122). Moreover, erotic-pornographic texts from mid-17th-century France focused on Schaulust, the dual drive to see and to know sexuality (p. 122). It was precisely upon this more or less erudite theatricalization of sex that the arousing fictions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries would be built (pp. 122–123).
Pornographic Enlightenment
Rehabilitating the senses and voluptuousness, the 18th century loosened the constraints that hampered the morals of the "Classical age" proper—assuming the latter even existed (p. 123). Formulating the notion of privacy, the Enlightenment established or reinvented new erotic motifs: hoisted skirts, break-ins (p. 124), spaces of immodesty (p. 124), the unbridled lubricity of clergy (p. 125) and adolescent girls (p. 125), the entanglement of reality and fiction (p. 126), and the arousing reminiscences of past pleasures (p. 126)—everything that the bourgeois 19th century in Europe and the Americas would rail against, or more accurately, pretend to rail against (p. 127).
A Scorching "Age of Vinegar"
Contrary to received wisdom, the bourgeois century was obsessed with sex and, ipso facto, with pornography (p. 128), as evidenced by both Directory-era France and the Biedermeier period in the states of the German Confederation and the Austrian Empire (p. 128). One even witnesses a hardcore drift in libertinism, attested to by lithographs (p. 129), the countless fetishes of the era (p. 130), and the recurring motifs of the abduction myth, which—combining violent kidnapping with sexual rapture (pp. 130–132)—corresponds to a reinterpretation of erotic animality (pp. 133–135) that permeates the brothel imaginary, a veritable obsession of the period (pp. 135–139). While necessary, this historical study of fictional arousal nonetheless raises numerous problems (pp. 140–141).
Pornography: Always, All the Time, Everywhere, for Everyone?
Two critical and theoretical schools coexist: for one, pornography is an anthropological, transhistorical given (p. 141); for the other, it is a modern invention of the 19th and 20th centuries (pp. 141–142). In either case, it is by no means natural: like the human practice of sexuality itself, it is culturally and socially constructed (p. 143), and must therefore be studied from both a historical and a sociological perspective (pp. 143–144). Its dual modeling (pp. 145–146) and cathartic (p. 146) dimensions furthermore rely on precisely codified practices and scripts (pp. 147–148).
Pornematic Logic
Pornographic genres are gendered: men and women do not seek the same elements in them (p. 148). To study this phenomenon, it is essential to outline a topic of "pornemes," the smallest meaningful units of this combinatorial system known as porn. These can pertain to the protagonists' physiques, sexual practices, or media techniques employed in representing coitus (pp. 148–150), and they apply equally to comic books, pulp fiction, novels, films, and videos (pp. 150–151). These very pornemes also help explain why the model of the female porn star is much closer to the average Western norm than is often realized (p. 152). Discrepancies nevertheless exist and demand interpretation, notably in the case of interracial porn (p. 153).
Sex Holidays and Tourism
The establishment, as early as the 18th century, of the tópoï of distant femininity and an ideal foreign sexuality (p. 154). The imaginary of the "colonial harem" (pp. 154–156), a variation on Orientalism (p. 156). Grounded in older foundations, this imaginary explains what is at play today both in exotic online porn—particularly Japanese, but also Slavic and Balkan (pp. 158–163)—and in sex tourism (p. 163). In both instances, a dynamic of domination is placed at the heart of arousal (pp. 164–165), which deserves to be studied using the notions of erotization, depersonalization, and typification (pp. 165–168)—notions that apply equally to the Black man, the Asian woman, and the latina, who constitute three major pornemes of porn 2.0.
Return to Pornemes
The "Wheel of Virgil" of pornemes (p. 169). A vast imaginary for an iterative genre (pp. 169–170)? "Body genres" (pp. 170–171). Their ideological and psychological implications within pornematic organization (pp. 171–173). Is fetishistic logic still at the core of arousing fictions (pp. 173–174)? A trompe-l'œil structure: hypercategories and subgenres (p. 174).
Spanking Stories
The recurring opposition in arousing fictions between romance and BDSM, the latter being essential in both pop culture and scholarly literature (pp. 175–177). The illuminating example of The Story of O (pp. 177–178). However, this phenomenon is far from exclusive to contemporary times (pp. 178–184), and Sade has served as a model for over two centuries (pp. 184–185), from late 19th-century English novels to today's British, Italian, and Spanish comics (p. 185). BDSM likewise depicts an unequal gendered relationship (pp. 185–186)—one viewed quite differently by critics (pp. 115–116). In reality, fictions present BDSM as a game tied to an extremely ancient imaginary linking violence and bliss (pp. 186–189). This is demonstrated by The 120 Days of Sodom (pp. 189–192) as well as $Shot, a New York performance from the early 2000s (p. 192), numerous Belle Époque novels (pp. 192–196), and contemporary mommy porn best-sellers (pp. 196–197). BDSM is one of the central pornemes of arousing fictions, which is why it combines so easily with others (p. 197).
Teens and MILFs
The MILF, a highly codified archetype, can be analyzed in socio-psychoanalytic terms (p. 198). The arousal she generates stems from her association of domination with power (p. 199), linking her to the BDSM imaginary (pp. 200–201) while participating in the sexualization of parental figures (p. 201). A new and valued way of regarding fantasy (pp. 201–204) is precisely what the MILF and her counterpart, the teen, represent (pp. 204–205), the latter being equally stereotyped (pp. 205–206). The embodiment of a perverse naivety, the teen is arousing precisely because she is "barely legal" (p. 207) and her representation relies on the pivot of Freudian Verleugnung (denial) (pp. 208–209)... and also because youth and beauty are closely intertwined in modern, postmodern, and hypermodern imaginaries (p. 209).
"Beauty in Porn"
Sexist canons that concern men and women alike (p. 210). The telling example of Shy Yume, the virtual and perfect beauty of Xhamster (pp. 210–211). Universals, invariants, and variations of female beauty (p. 211): breasts, legs, buttocks, thighs, hips—as well as hair (pp. 211–212).
Capillary Pornography
Pornography, which is a metaphysics (p. 212), is also a matter of hair, and has been for a very long time (pp. 212–214). The example of the sexualization of red hair (pp. 214–215), whose long history deserves clarification (pp. 215–218). The same applies to the erotization of blondness (pp. 218–225). This erotization migrated from high culture to pop culture—a transition greatly fostered by the century-long influence of playmates and advertising pinups (pp. 225–227).
Those Pinned-Up Sexy Beauties
Did the pinup originate in the 15th or the 19th century (p. 228)? Once again, the importance of the bourgeois century (pp. 228–229), the Belle Époque (pp. 229–230), and even more so, the roaring twenties (pp. 230–231). From flat flapper girls to voluptuous pinups (pp. 231–243). "Fabulous fifties, sexy sixties" (pp. 243–246). The invention of the playmate (pp. 246–250). The fantasy of sea, sex, sun, and sand (pp. 250–252) embodied by the bimbo, a new source of arousal (pp. 252–254). The real doll: a hypermodern ideal (p. 254) or the ultimate reification of women reduced to domestic objects (pp. 254–256)?
Reification of the Subject, Enjoyment of the Object?
Reification and immersion in arousing fictions (pp. 256–258). The libidinal investment sparked by these fictions blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality (p. 258) in videos as well as literature (pp. 258–259). Hence the significance of the erotic-pornographic autofiction genre (pp. 259–262). That a process of reification is at work remains undeniable—reification intersecting with notions of denied autonomy, passivity, interchangeability, and violability (p. 262). Yet even on this point, feminist and women's studies scholars disagree (pp. 262–263). One must certainly account for the specificities of hypermodernity, which links sexualization to a young, smooth, desirable, and perpetually desiring body (pp. 264–268). However, much of what is erotized is also driven by extremely ancient, anthropological, and even biological-genetic reasons (p. 268): the illuminating example of blondness and the Würm glaciation (pp. 268–270). Paradoxically, however, contemporary pornography also enjoys staging ordinary bodies, as revealed by the prevalence of the girl next door (pp. 270–272). Thus, arousing fiction is less about displaying beauty than about staging jouissance (pp. 273–276)—a jouissance that relentlessly passes itself off as real (pp. 276–278).
Climax
The depiction of sexuality, an invariant in human fiction since protohistory, has played a crucial phylogenetic role in the evolution of the human species (p. 278) and in cultural movements throughout history (pp. 279–284). In contemporary times, the 1970s marked a major turning point (pp. 284–286), pursued in various ways by the 1980s (pp. 286–287), 1990s (pp. 287–288), and 2000s (pp. 288–289). From a theoretical standpoint, pornography and erotism, while neighboring registers, actually encompass two antithetical socialization processes (pp. 289–290) that can only be analyzed through a culturalist perspective incorporating the contributions of both cognitive neuropsychology and text analysis (pp. 290–291). Ultimately, this culturalist approach explains the profound reasons for the distinction between representations of sexuality and sexual representations (p. 186) in our era of cyber-reality (pp. 291–295).
Bibliography (p. 297)
This study examines fictions that stage and provoke sexual desire, drawing upon literature and the fine arts, as well as mass and entertainment arts such as fashion, advertisements, comic books, graphic novels, online videos, and rock music. The work adopts anthropological, psychological, and culturalist perspectives to understand why arousing fictions hold a prominent place in culture, and traces representations of sexuality across historical periods including antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the classical era. Readers interested in cultural studies and media representations of the body may find this work relevant.
Discussions engage with concepts such as the male gaze and female gaze, alongside ideological constructions that reflect macrosociological shifts and the normalization of the depiction of sexuality. By surveying both historical precedents and cultural phenomena, texts within this field situate contemporary pornographic expression within a broader tradition of arousing fictions, examining how societies negotiate the boundaries between the licit and the illicit across diverse media forms.