| The very idea of decadence, or what it means to be famously, or infamously, decadent, is nearly impossible to define; it is difficult to say where aestheticism stops and decadence begins, or if there is a definitive difference between them. This course will examine the moral lunacy, madness and degeneration that was ascribed to decadence as the mal du siècle through an investigation of stylistics and polemics as well as the influence of gender and feminism on the aesthetic and decadent movements. Questions of Darwinian degeneration, in/validated hysterics, literary transvestism, sexual deviants/ce and gender performativity will inform our discussions of the nineteenth-century texts with an eye to the current construction of decadence at our recent fin de siècle. |
