Décadence in France and Italy: description
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Prof. Barbara Vinken, Department of Roman Studies, LMU
- Prof. Gerhard Regn, Department of Roman Studies, LMU
The course will study the phenomenon of decadent literature, the so called fin de siècle, in texts by d’Annunzio, Huysmans et Zola. D’Annunzio texts, following Huysman’s analysis in A rebours, are dominated by a a violent repulsion and rejection of the ennui and insignificance of everyday’s contemporary life.
Annunzio’s as well as Huysmans oeuvre seeks the absolute aesthetization of every day life, leading to paradoxical extremes. Their life and work should become a Gesamtkunstwerk in opposition to anything contemporary. Zola, on the contrary, condemms this kind of art as decadent. And yet, in the negative, his oeuvre remains haunted by the idea of décadence both as aesthetics and as politics. The Second Empire, depicted in the Rougon-Macquart, is mainly the unbriddled reign of all things decadent, that serves as backdrop for Zola’s Social Darwinism. While the fin de siècle explores an individual esthetics of infertility, whose only duty is the stylization of piacere, Zola’s mission opposes to that a poetics of naturalism and a new moral of fertility. In a Virgilian mode he sings the birth of a new race, whose new men should spread the blessings of the French Empire to the confines of this world.
Annunzio’s as well as Huysmans oeuvre seeks the absolute aesthetization of every day life, leading to paradoxical extremes. Their life and work should become a Gesamtkunstwerk in opposition to anything contemporary. Zola, on the contrary, condemms this kind of art as decadent. And yet, in the negative, his oeuvre remains haunted by the idea of décadence both as aesthetics and as politics. The Second Empire, depicted in the Rougon-Macquart, is mainly the unbriddled reign of all things decadent, that serves as backdrop for Zola’s Social Darwinism. While the fin de siècle explores an individual esthetics of infertility, whose only duty is the stylization of piacere, Zola’s mission opposes to that a poetics of naturalism and a new moral of fertility. In a Virgilian mode he sings the birth of a new race, whose new men should spread the blessings of the French Empire to the confines of this world.
