Rue des Beaux-Arts n°70 – Janvier/Février/Mars 2020
monstre délicat? What does it mean for us now to enjoy, teach, and
even create Decadent literature, Decadent visual arts, criticism about
Decadence, in an age when global warming and climate catastrophes
have become our most urgent political crisis? What are the Decadent
art forms and theories that speak to the current century and its
numerous catastrophes? How does Decadence signify differently now,
along with other related terms of the fin de siècle such as Aestheticism,
Symbolism, Impressionism, and Modernism, as we contemplate our
own fin du globe? How has Decadence figured globally in the political
crises and aesthetic migrations of the past two centuries?
This
conference will consider the phenomenon of Decadence from its
emergence as a social theory and an aesthetic movement in the 19th
century to its current resurgence and refiguration in the art and
criticism of our present moment and environment.
Decadent De/Generations: What has this generation inherited from the
Decadent Movement? How has Decadence imagined "catastrophe" in
the sense of disaster, of degeneration, disintegration, apocalypse,
extinction?
What, if anything, comes after Decadence and its
catastrophes? What overtures do they make?
The Ends of the World: When Baudelaire writes of the ships coming
from the ends of the world (du bout du monde) to satisfy our every
desire, when Pater writes of the head of the Mona Lisa upon which all
the ends of the world are come, we might suppose, however
counterintuitively, that the surface of a globe can have a spatial
beginning, an end, even multiple ends, a center, a periphery, even a
north, south, east, and west. How does Decadence conceive the global,
the global empire, or for that matter its various political "ends"? How
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