This seminar considers how the Enlightenment idea of "moral character," as something understood and engendered through reading, connects the emergence of both pornography and the novel as distinct categories of representation in Europe. We will explore the ongoing reverberations of those connections in terms of ethical questions and changing ideas of identity, gender difference, individualism, privacy, subjectivity and new media. Readings in recent criticism, history and theory of pornography and the novel accompany primary readings, which will be drawn mainly from the core of the tradition in French and English literatures.