Copyright

Will McMorran;

Published On

2025-09-24

Page Range

pp. 175–208

Language

  • English

Print Length

34 pages

Teaching with Sade

  • Will McMorran (author)
Chapter of: Sensing Violence: Reading with the Marquis de Sade (pp. 175–208)

This chapter explores what the embodied approach delineated in previous chapters might mean for the ways in which we teach literature and pornography in the university classroom. It examines the role of the body in learning, and in the pedagogies championed by feminist thinkers such as bell hooks and Jane Gallop. Going back to Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir as a model of how not to teach, this chapter then draws on my own experiences in the classroom to reflect on the challenges Sade, and pornography more broadly, pose for instructors and students alike.

Contributors

Will McMorran

(author)
Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London

Will McMorran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has published several articles and book chapters on Sade and the history of his reception, and has edited and translated two of his works: 'The 120 Days of Sodom' (2016) for Penguin Classics with Thomas Wynn, which was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and The Marquise de Gange (2021) for Oxford World’s Classics. His work as a translator has also included several stories for 'The Penguin Book of French Short Stories' (2022), and Philippe Brenot’s graphic history, 'The Story of Sex' (2016).