Rue des Beaux-Arts n°70 – Janvier/Février/Mars 2020
cosmopolitan are its aesthetes? How does it migrate across various
borders and various oceans? When does it ever arrive at the ends of
its worlds, and how does it return?
Decadence and Eco-criticism: Are there really Flowers of Evil?
Romantic poetry lends itself well to eco-criticism, but what about the
literature we call Decadent, which may or may not always valorize all
that is artificial, destructive, luxurious, and "against nature"? How
does environmentalism invite us to rethink Decadence, and vice versa,
whether in the 19th century, the 20th, or now? How do we conceive of
pleasure and excess at the end of a world?
Is Decadence, or its
critique, a luxury we could never afford?
Decadent Modernity: Decadence is a theory of the fall of empires, and
Ancient Rome is chief among them. As Oscar Wilde wrote, however,
"Nero and Narcissus are always with us," and the insight is and has
been instructive for just about every capital in the modern world. How
is Decadence a theory of modernity, about the ends of our own
civilizations, about British or French imperialism, or about American
or Asian cultural hegemony and decline? How do Decadent endings
figure in the styles we call modernist, or postmodernist, or whatever
has come after?
Fallen Cities: Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, Pompei, Rome, Capri,
London, Paris, Venice, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, you've
been there.
Decadent Endings: Considering "catastrophe" in the literary sense as
the unraveling or denouement of a drama, what is distinctive about the
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