“The black-and-white video begins with a woman sitting at a table with a book in front of her. She looks into the camera and states her name, the name of the book, and begins to read. It seems she’s overwhelmed by the words — there’s a slight twitch, a smirk, a straightening of the back, a desperate breath in — and she struggles to continue reading.”

“By getting hung up on the novelty, which Cubitt begs that you reconsider, Singer ignores the opportunity to investigate such ideas, and unknowingly says more about himself than the work at hand. By not addressing these other pivotal ingredients, one misses a large part of what makes these pieces so interesting.”

“But “Hysterical Literature” doesn’t feel particularly sexy—or, at least, not in any tried and true sense. In the first place, it’s essentially an endurance test; unlike in traditional smut, viewers may actually find themselves rooting for the subject to rein in her passion (at least until the end of the paragraph). Indeed, if these videos can be termed pornographic, then at the very least, they are fascinatingly so: From the sub-desk manipulations to the videos’ guise of literariness, everything remotely sexual is intentionally obscured.

So, is “Hysterical Literature” obscene? Or is it humorous? Perhaps obscenely humorous—even, say, “hysterical?” The Supreme Court once famously ruled that we’ll know pornography when we see it—but after watching these videos, I honestly can’t be sure. What I can say is, they’re entertaining—and perhaps even educational: not only are the books themselves well worth a read, but also, sexual politics in this country being what they are, it’s likely not everyone has seen (or had) a legitimate girlgasm. Plus, for all us logophiles, watching ladies appear to lose themselves merely through the fervor of ecstatic prose is at least tongue-in-cheek amusing, if not actually a little hot.”

“At one point she interrupts her narration with a polite, “Excuse me.” At others she pulls herself together with a concerted effort to continue reading before finally giving in after the line, “There is no earthly power but Satan.”