106-060 Decadence

Usually 12.5 points of first year English, or first year European studies.

This subject examines decadence as a textual, historical, sexual and cultural formation, across a range of literary texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A predominantly masculine mode of radical aestheticism, manifesting symptoms of cultural crisis and informed by anxieties about class, gender and sexuality, decadence elaborated such key figures of modernity as the dandy, femme fatale, fetishist and aesthete. Students will be introduced to European and British varieties of literary decadence and aestheticism; art for art's sake theories of aesthetic production; relations between lifestyle, aestheticism and commodity culture; and emergent discourses of degeneration and sexology. The subject asks students to consider how decadent aestheticism was shaped by regulatory categories of taste and vulgarity, and by cultural practices of tastemaking, lifestyling and the aestheticisation of sexuality. Students will also consider the relationship between sexual dissidence and social and cultural distinction as produced in the representative examples of decadent writing studied.

• be able to apply new research skills and critical methods to a field of inquiry;

• develop critical self-awareness and shape and strengthen persuasive arguments;

• be able to communicate arguments and ideas effectively and articulately both in writing and to others.

An essay of 1500 words 40% (due mid-semester) and an essay of 2500 words 60% (due at the end of semester).

A subject reader including poetry by Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Swinburne, short novels by Ren

• J-K Huysmans, A rebours (Against Nature). OUP.
• H James, The Spoils of Poynton. Penguin.
• M Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris. Broadview.
• Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs. Penguin.
• H G Wells, The Time Machine. Heinemann.
• O Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin.