颓废文学的精神深度或媚俗策略之解码

以王朔为代表的“颓废文学”既是对高举“载道”、“代言”大旗的“伤痕文学”的嘲笑,又是对追求“民主”、“现代化”征兆的“朦胧诗”潮的反戈;既是对“重建乌托邦神话”的“寻根文学”之叛逆,又是对“先抑后扬”、“入世”和“转轨”的“先锋小说”之变脸。在此基础上,主创者们再佐以“新写实”中“甘为卑贱”、“粗痞”和“反禁忌”的人生原汁,就做成了一道“颓废”十足的世纪末之文化快餐。这一股文学思潮极大地迎合了广大市民不要信仰、及时行乐和对金钱占有之世纪末“颓废情绪”,是市场经济发展到一定阶段所必然出现的文学过程。     

Constitutionalism,the Public Philosophy,and Political Science

Examining Willa Cather's corpus of literary works reveals several phases of her illustrious career. After defending commercial culture in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, her later novels, especially her One of Ours, diagnose an unmediated split in the Western world illustrated by the experience of the Great War: the bourgeois commercial culture undermines aspirations for human greatness. Her later novels deepen this diagnosis and offer a way out in a return to a rooted community of believers living in the shadows of the Church.     

(Sick) Love and the Older Woman in Marcel Prévost's L’Automne d’une femme

Marcel Prévost, a prolific novelist, journalist, and academician, is best known for works such as Les Demi-Vierges (1894), which demonstrates how Parisian society and education corrupt young women, and Les Vierges fortes (1900), which, according to Louise Lyle, “develop[s] the concept of the secular, self-perpetuating community of female educators only to explode it as an empty ideal” (60). In his 1893 novel, L’Automne d’une femme, Prévost focuses not on virgins but on the older woman, telling the story of forty-year-old Julie, who has languished for over twenty years in an arranged marriage to Antoine Surgère. Despite having the natural ability to ease the suffering of others, Julie shows no interest in nursing her husband when he falls ill, though she eagerly cares for the daughter of one of his colleagues, Claire Esquier, and the son of another associate, Maurice Artoy, who is all too eager to reciprocate when Julie's feelings for him become something more than maternal. Unbeknownst to Julie, however, Maurice and Claire once dabbled in a youthful romance that neither forgot. The glue that holds this tangled web of relationships together is illness, a theme so pervasive that the verb souffrir and its derivatives are employed no fewer than 137 times, along with myriad other terms related to pain. Prévost's creation of a veritable culture of illness in which love cannot possibly flourish for the woman in her “autumn” might be said, in fact, to feed into the Decadent vision of woman as dangerous and corrupting.     

Decadence as historical myth and cultural theory

This article traces the early history of the concept of European decadence with special emphasis on its manifestations in French literary production in the period between 1860 and 1900. It argues that decadence was not a historical reality, but a cultural myth, that gave expression to a new, specifically urban experience of modernity first thematized in Baudelaire's poetry and prose work. It further claims that this concept continues to have important contemporary relevance in the form of debates about the “second modernity” and the new “cosmopolitanism.”     

Progress,decline and redemption: understanding war and imagining Europe, 1870s–1890s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which ideas of and discourses about Europe were influenced by some readings of war and war violence from the 1870s to the 1890s. This aim is pursued by considering the dichotomy progress/decadence, a crucial opposition for grasping images and notions of Europe as well as interpretations of warfare violence. The article focuses on the works of Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the young Paul Valéry at a time when, in intellectual and academic circles, there was an increasing fear of European decadence and degeneration.     

Anatomy of the Superman: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Response to Nietzsche

This essay explores D’Annunzio’s reception of Nietzsche—particularly his sociopolitical theory and idea of the Übermensch—as dramatized in his novel Le Vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks). D’Annunzio’s attitude towards Nietzsche was complicated and contradictory, varying from fascination and rivalry to rejection and negation: rather than a philosopher or master, he saw Nietzsche as a poet and soulmate. Like many writers and artists of fin-de-siècle Europe, D’Annunzio too was attracted by Nietzsche’s elitist social theory and Übermensch, of which he presents his own version especially in Maidens of the Rocks. In the novel, the young aristocrat Claudio Cantelmo aspires to overcome himself. However, the fact that Cantelmo fails to achieve his dream of fathering a New King of Rome, reveals D’Annunzio’s deep skepticism about contemporary Italy as well as his own “decadent” soul.