UC Berkeley

This dissertation traces the literary-historical development of the aesthetics of what it calls kink desire, rooted in the discourse of “sexuality” and sexual identities that emerged in nineteenth-century Victorian medicine and German sexology. It identifies this development in narrative forms that resist the closure and linear continuity of the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot novel. The dissertation turns to Romantic (Kleist, Emily Brontë) and modernist (Musil, Lewis) novels that adapt the structure of the marriage plot and the Bildungsroman, yet undermine their linear narratives of the social integration of the individual subject’s sexual desires with frame stories, false endings, and fragments. It argues that the fragmentary nature of these narrative forms emerges from the material impossibility, in the Romantic period, of creating a narrative of social integration for certain categories of sexual desire and taste. Yet from this impossibility emerge new forms of sexual sociality based not on a dialectic sublation of the individual with the family and the state, but rather on sub-communities formed from a shared pedagogy and aesthetic experience of desire. For example, the second chapter moves to the later 1800s to examine how Venus in Furs and the early sexology work Psychopathia Sexualis established two genres that conditioned the modern experience of desire: the decadent philosophical novel and the medical case study, respectively. But in both cases, the reactions of their readers exceeded the pedagogical intentions laid out in the framing material, with Sacher-Masoch’s novel inspiring an avid fan culture and Krafft-Ebing’s medical textbook inspiring confessional letters from lay readers. As the dissertation tracks the social circulation of these narrative forms, it also attends in the last chapters to their use in literary debates about avant-garde aesthetics and the status of art in the work of writers like Wyndham Lewis. In tracing the development of this aesthetics, this dissertation challenges the dichotomy in much of contemporary queer theory between a radical resistance to social structures like the family and the state and a simple liberal assimilation into those structures. In doing so, it reorients the literary history of sexuality around the ways that a continuity of narrative forms provided the infrastructure for new social groupings.