Sexuality and Un-Reason in the Poetics of Realism: De Sade and Dostoevsky | Millicent Vladiv-Glover

Summary: On the basis of an analysis of Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), a claim is made about the foundational connection between the themes of sexuality and un-reason as constituents of reason and the poetics of Realism in the European canon of the 19th century (Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Dickens). Reason/un-reason is framed by Kant’s aesthetics and the conceptualization of the supersensible self.