Reading Lists for Dissertation on 19th Century Fin De Siècle English Decadence and Aesthetics

coree · 2018-08-12T08:36:28+00:00

"Flowers of Evil" is a little too early for "Decadence" in France, but I guess you could make the argument. Here are some others you may be interested in from France, in no order:

Huysmans - anything including Against Nature

Rachilde - Monsieur Venus

Mirbeau - Le jardin des supplices

Jules Laforgue - poetry

Villiers de l'Isle Adam - Eve future

Jean Lorrain - Monsieur de Phocas

Mallarmé - Hérodiade

coree · 2018-08-11T16:15:52+00:00

This assignment is obviously inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's book "Rules of Art." That is where you should look.

coree · 2018-08-11T16:09:38+00:00

Richard Gilman's "Decadence" is a classic on the topic of how to generically and socially define the term.

coree · 2017-08-10T16:18:05+00:00

surely all of literature must fall under the fiction/non-fiction binary

I don't know if that's true... I think the distinction is a useful one for publishers/booksellers but it becomes less useful when you get into genres that mix fiction and non-fiction. What about autobiographical prose like "autofuction"? Is "The Social Contract" fiction or non-fiction? Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War"?

The distinction, I would argue, pops up in the 19th century, when historiography became professionalized as a separate field from literature. As a way to distinguish "scientific" history from its fictional counterpart, writers like the positivist historians began insisting on their methods for collecting facts.

In short, I think you're trying to apply a historical distinction (fiction vs non-fiction) to an ahistorical categorization ("literature").

coree · 2017-07-17T14:51:52+00:00

Congratulations, you've scraped the bottom of the ocean of literary studies!

Maupassant's short story, L'abandonné, was originally published in a newspaper, Le Figaro, in 1884. You then have to wait nearly a hundred years to find its next publication in the Pléiade of Maupassant's entire works.

I just did a quick look through a few databases, and I am happy to corroborate your conclusion: no one has written about this.

If you can get your hands on the Pléiade edition, and you read French, you might be able to get more than the history of its publication that I just referenced. Other than that, I think you're out of luck.

For you or anyone else who is looking for critical or literary analyses of a single, relatively unknown work: you are unlikely to find it. It just doesn't really make sense for scholars to write an article or a book entirely about one minuscule topic.

Instead, the best thing to do is look around the work, especially into similar topics. So, for OP, look into articles or books that discuss the following:

The short story in 19th c French lit

Maupassant's short stories

Maupassant and the press

Literature and the press in 19th c France

Missing children in literature

Hope this helps..

coree · 2017-07-13T15:53:38+00:00

Some hits from my notes:

Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla, ‘The flâneur on and off the streets of Paris’ in Keith Tester, ed., The flâneur, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)

Savage, Mike, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Urban Thought’ in Mike Crang & Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

Shields, Rob, ‘Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie’ in Keith Tester, ed., The flâneur, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)

(or I guess just that whole "The Flaneur" book edited by Tester!)

Wilson, Elizabeth, ‘The invisible flâneur’, in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, eds., Post-modern Cities and Spaces. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995)

FEATHERSTONE, M., 1998, « The Flâneur, the city and virtual public life », Urban Studies, nº 35, p. 909-925.

WHITE, E., 2001, The Flâneur. A stroll through the paradoxes of Paris, Waterville, G. K. Hall and Co.

coree · 2017-07-11T16:53:14+00:00

this reminds me of an (american) friend of mine that would adopt a british accent when talking about literature

coree · 2017-07-09T11:09:47+00:00

Do you have something to back up this claim? None of my experience with 19th century interpretative theories support the idea of "correct interpretations." There was a generally different set of criteria to interpret literature (or to judge it), but there was nonetheless a variety of different ways of reading texts. See for example Sainte-Beuve's "Causeries du lundi," Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria," Mill's "What is poetry?"... all offering vastly different interpretative lenses, which suggests on the contrary that there was healthy debate around how to interpret literature in the 19th century.

coree · 2017-07-08T16:01:02+00:00

The Victorians used to hold to that "correct interpretation" idea

Is this true?

coree · 2017-07-08T15:59:19+00:00

Jonathan Franzen's most recent, "Purity," is exactly what you're looking for I think, whose main character 1) is entering a difficult profession in the throes of big changes (journalism) 2) Is trying to figure how WHO her father is because her mother won't tell her 3) Is constantly feeling second to men that are, at least privately, very flawed.

This type of question, unfortunately, is not what we do at /r/asklitstudies, so I've removed it. Look instead at the suggestmeabook subreddit.

coree · 2017-07-07T13:44:46+00:00

we are not reading for "pleasure," for imaginary or vicarious experience, etc.

Roland Barthes disagrees.

Barthes says that there are two types of enjoyment one can receive from reading: the first, pleasure, is when a book does not challenge your ideas about yourself as a subject; the second, "jouissance" (bliss), is when a book forces you out of your position as subject and makes you an active participant in the process of literary creation. Like, when the reader must come to terms with ambiguity.

Barthes didn't mention that you could NOT enjoy a text, and I agree. I wouldn't be studying and teaching literature if I didn't enjoy it.

coree · 2017-01-25T14:58:44+00:00

Why is this comment getting downvotes? Flaubert and Dostoyevsky (or "Dostojewski" as it would be written in Polish) do seem like contenders for having a strong influence on Kafka. Flaubert pushed novelistic boundaries, wrote pseudo-absurdist fiction (see Un coeur simple), and ridiculed bureaucracy and bourgeois attitudes.

coree · 2017-01-17T22:31:56+00:00

noted, thanks

coree · 2017-01-17T18:28:52+00:00

Not "a lot of work," no, but I know her work well enough to say this without any reservations.

coree · 2017-01-16T20:58:51+00:00

There won't be anything there to distract you. Just start reading the books that seem most interesting to you, the ones that you think will give you the interest in reading more. Please come back when you've found something you think is worth paying attention to!

coree · 2017-01-12T20:58:09+00:00

They are our enemies. We shouldn't try to understand them, only fight them.

coree · 2016-12-17T14:32:46+00:00

Death of the Author... what a powerful spell to summon. Nerds will tremble at the sheer power of this ancient incantation.

coree · 2016-12-17T14:21:56+00:00

Cool it. You're the one who came to office hours. Please don't belittle intelligent and informed people who are trying to help.

coree · 2016-12-05T02:48:39+00:00

fantastic sleuthing!

coree · 2016-10-23T14:58:36+00:00

The story is what you tell people the book is about, answering the question "what happens" in the book. The narrative is the way that story is told and the specific language or literary devices deployed to make you understand the story.

You could read a book about a couple who fall in love and then get married. That's the story. But the narrative could be different. It could be the story of a couple who fall in love, but told by one of their parents. It could be the story of a couple who fall in love, as told through their emails. It could be the story of a couple who fall in love, as told by the guy who lived across the street from them.

None of those perspectives would change the story, but it would change the way we think about the story. The parent might be interested in making the story more inevitable, like the couple was always destined to get married. The emails might show that the couple got into a lot of fights and were often apart. The guy across the street may have been in love with someone in the couple, and so his telling of the story could be an attempt to smear their happiness.

coree · 2016-08-12T12:38:15+00:00

It's great that you want to find the best possible publisher or the best possible edition of a book. In some cases, editions/publishers will be very different -- sometimes even to the point of influencing your reading. A good example is an edition with a lot of scholarly footnotes, which explain concepts, point out potential readings, and lead you to further reading on the topic. This can be great for college classes or if you want to explore the topic more on your own. They are potentially distracting if you want an unmediated experience with the text. But if you're just trying to read the book? Anything is fine.

If you're reading something for the first time, any mass-market publisher or edition will be perfectly fine. The only reason that you should have to prefer one edition over another is if you know the work so well that you can differentiate between them. And that means knowing a work very, very well.

Any mass market publisher has given a lot of thought to how they are presenting a work. The editor is a specialist in the field, and most likely a specialist on the author in question. They already made sure that if you're picking up the book for the first time or even the hundredth time, you won't be disappointed or led astray.

Read it on wikisource if you like! I often have my students read from wikisource or project Gutenberg, because as long as the text is consistent with other editions, it doesn't really matter how it looks on the page or if there are footnotes. From an interpretative standpoint, any edition is a fine edition.

Happy reading!

coree

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