Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism

Proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism.

In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing. Throw Yourself Away is distinctive in its sustained focus on masochism as an engine of literary production across multiple authors and genres. In particular, Jarcho shows that theater has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary.

Jarcho foregrounds writing as a project of distressed subjects: When masochistic writing is examined as a strategy of response to injurious social systems, it yields a surprisingly feminized-and less uniformly white-image of both masochism and authorship. Ultimately, Jarcho argues that a retheorized concept of masochism helps us understand literature itself as a sex act and shows us how writing can tend to our burdened, desirous bodies. With startling insights into such writers as Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy, Throw Yourself Away furnishes a new masochistic theory of literature itself.

Julia Jarcho is a writer, theater artist, and scholar from New York City. She is head of playwriting and associate professor of theatre arts and performance studies at Brown University and an OBIE award-winning playwright and director with the New York-based company Minor Theater. Her plays have been published in the collection Minor Theater: Three Plays, and she is the author of Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama.