Gearing Up for Sex Week at Yale with some Pretty Creepy Literary Criticism

Monday, cigarette #1
The Everlasting Cigarette of Chastity

Bluntly equating literary discourse with sexual intercourse, Wister indicates [in The Virginian] that a cowboy can make love to a woman only by first gaining intellectual access to her through an acquaintance with canonical fiction. —Blake Allmendinger, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture

We can never embrace (sexually or otherwise) a single person, but embrace the whole of her or his family romance. —Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence

Hat Tip on both: The Rat