Décadences et fins de siècle(French Studies)
FRENCH 447
Professor Natania Meeker
Department of French and Italian
Fall 2008, 34290D
Tuesday, Thursday: 2-3:20 PM, THH109
“In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured.”
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Course description:
Decadence—the word conjures up images of languid aesthetes and the “artificial paradises” of opium and hashish. Yet the decadent attitude is more than a set of practices, however provocative, unusual, or mild-altering. It is also at the origin of a radical philosophy of history, and the basis of a transformative aesthetics encompassing literature, music, and the visual arts. In this course, we will study decadence—and its beginnings in fin de siècle debates around social change—as a way not just of acting but of thinking—and, above all, as a means of making sense, perversely, of decadence’s opposite: progress.
Most regularly associated with the end of the nineteenth century, the decadent movement was characterized, in France, not only by an increasingartistic obsession with disorder and disease (from tuberculosis to syphilis) but by widespread interest in the supposed symptoms of social and cultural decay—includingcrime, gender confusion, physical and mental degeneracy, drug use, and “bad” art. At the intersection of this fascination and this horror arose shocking new modes ofliterary and artistic representation—from the novels of Huysmans and Rachilde to the sinuous femmes fatales of decadent painting. But the debilitating effects of decadence and their paradoxical link to all that is new and modern—from figures of emancipated women to projects for technological innovation—had been a focus of French art and culture long before the late nineteenth century, as we will examine. In a more general sense, debates around the concept of cultural decline had played an important role in shaping the course of French literature and philosophy since at least the seventeenth century. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns of the 1690s already demonstrated a concern with the end of the century (fin de siècle) as a moment inextricably bound up in processes of both progress and decay.
In this class, we will investigate the concepts of decadence and the fin de siècle as central to three crucial turning points in French thought: the “Quarrel” at the end of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth, and the rise of decadent aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth. We will conclude the course with a brief examination of contemporary reflections on the so-called decline of French culture—and an even briefer excursus into North American culture as the very emblem of modern decadence. The class will be conducted in French.
Readings will include: Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, Baudrillard’sAmérique, Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Nordau’s Dégénérescence, Perrault’sContes, Rachilde’sMonsieur Vénus, Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, and Sade’s Les Crimes de l’amour.
For more information regarding the course, please contact Natania Meeker at . For D-clearance, please call the Department of French and Italian at (213) 740-3700.