Graduate Seminar: Cross-List for French and Comparative Literature Spring 2007
Professor: Emily Apter
Decadence (The Century )

Decadence is associated with “late style;” specifically with the Symbolist (late Romantic) and Naturalist (late Realist) aesthetics of fin-de-siècle France. The period in question, roughly 1860-1910, was marked by the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune, general strikes, anarchist sabotage, and colonial expansionism. Xenophobia and antisemitism fused in an ideological fulcrum around the Dreyfus affair and contributed to a culture of paranoia, racism, and conspiracy theory. Apocalyptic finalism also took hold, shaped by fears of economic and social debacle, afflicted vitalism, sterility, clinical pathology, and deviant sexuality. This vision of political decadence – which continues in key respects into the 20 th century - was intellectually anchored by Marx's transhistorical and transnational vision of capitalist decadence, Freud's theory of the death drive, and Mallarmé's negative theology of the symbol. Drawing on critical work by Freud, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Max Nordau, Cioran, Alain Badiou, and Edward Said – the course will attempt to “think decadence” as a problem of “how to think a century.” Literary texts by Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans and Mallarmé will anchor the critical consideration of how “decadence” thinks the century; how history, temporality, late style, and periodization are theorized within literary studies. Reading knowledge of French required.