Decadent Orientalisms

Decadent Orientalisms PDF Author: David Fieni
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823286409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said's claim that Orientalism is a "style of having power," Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts--"truths" that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism's power.

Decadent Orientalisms

Decadent Orientalisms PDF Author: David Fieni
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.

Decadent Orientalisms

Decadent Orientalisms PDF Author: David Fieni
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823286409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said's claim that Orientalism is a "style of having power," Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts--"truths" that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism's power.

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 PDF Author: Katharina Herold-Zanker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198881002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical engagement with other cultures. In bringing together two fin-de-siècle European literatures, this comparative study makes a case for the transnational, if not imperial, nature of Decadence. The East emerges as an 'indispensable' mediator between various versions of European Decadence. The book examines the role of the East with specific reference to selected English and German authors: starting from Oscar Wilde's Victorian vision of Egypt and Arthur Symons's and Violet Fane's image of Constantinople, it moves to Paul Scheerbart's and Else Lasker-Schüler's Decadent Babylon and Assyria and concludes by turning to Stefan George's exclusion of the East from his poetic practice. The geographical reach of the East focuses on regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. The cultural translation of specifically the Middle East into different European national contexts gains new—sometimes oppositional—meanings, avoiding a one-sided representation of both the East and the two national literatures that absorbed it. In arguing for a Decadent cosmopolitanism as a model of heterogeneous inclusivity that reaches beyond the binaries established by Edward Said's Orientalism, the present book brings twenty-first century theories of cosmopolitanism into dialogue with art history and literature to uncover striking synergies and interdependences between the different manifestations of Decadence in England and Germany.

Hotel Modernisms

Hotel Modernisms PDF Author: Anna Despotopoulou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000834301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukács, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of “hotel modernisms” as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

Staging Decadence

Staging Decadence PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135023706X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 PDF Author: Katharina Herold-Zanker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198880979
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written in England and Germany, exploring the relationship between Orientalism, Decadence, and cosmopolitanism, arguing that representations of the East played a critical role in the literary landscape of Decadence over this period.

French Decadence in a Global Context

French Decadence in a Global Context PDF Author: Julia Hartley
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1802071091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Decadence is seldom looked at in the context of colonialism, and yet its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s is directly contemporary with the expansion of France’s modern colonial empire. Ever a slippery signifier, Decadence figures alternately as pro-colonial, anticolonial and apolitical. This edited volume gives a sense of the sheer range and diversity of intersections between colonialism and Decadence, from anticolonial anarchist writers to colonial discourse, from nineteenth-century women writers to our contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. Different chapters explore these intersections in the cultural imagination of dance, the novel, travel writing, historiographical theory, and literary networks. Decadence is often seen as an essentially metropolitan, urban movement, but this study identifies key spaces elsewhere, from fin-de-siècle Saigon to India in the heyday of French colonialism, from Byzantium to ancient Persia. Although the colonies were held up by some as an antidote to the threat of French decline, other writings reveal anxiety that the antidote might itself be a form of poison. Colonial contact might exacerbate degeneration, whether through cultural mixing or through the violence of colonial aggression itself. A profound anxiety about French identity and France’s so-called mission civilisatrice is played out through the imagery, the style and the pose of Decadence.

The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins

The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins PDF Author: Clive Bloom
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030845621
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research on the Gothic Revival. The Gothic Revival was based on emotion rather than reason and when Horace Walpole created Strawberry Hill House, a gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, he had to create new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle. Nevertheless, Walpole’s house produced nightmares and his book The Castle of Otranto was the first truly gothic novel, with supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements challenging the emergent fiction of social relationships. The novel’s themes of violence, tragedy, death, imprisonment, castle battlements, dungeons, fair maidens, secrets, ghosts and prophecies led to a new genre encompassing prose, theatre, poetry and painting, whilst opening up a whole world of imagination for entrepreneurial female writers such as Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie and Ann Radcliffe, whose immensely popular books led to the intense inner landscapes of the Bronte sisters. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk created a new gothic: atheistic, decadent, perverse, necrophilic and hellish. The social upheaval of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Romantic movement with its more intense (and often) atheistic self-absorption led the gothic into darker corners of human experience with a greater emphasis on the inner life, hallucination, delusion, drug addiction, mental instability, perversion and death and the emerging science of psychology. The intensity of the German experience led to an emphasis on doubles and schizophrenic behaviour, ghosts, spirits, mesmerism, the occult and hell. This volume charts the origins of this major shift in social perceptions and completes a trilogy of Palgrave Handbooks on the Gothic—combined they provide an exhaustive survey of current research in Gothic studies, a go-to for students and researchers alike.

Dorian Unbound

Dorian Unbound PDF Author: Sean O'Toole
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421446545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Building upon a large body of archival and critical work on Oscar Wilde's only novel, Dorian Unbound offers a new account of the importance of transnational contexts in the forging of Wilde's imagination and the wider genealogy of literary Decadence. Sean O'Toole argues that the attention critics have rightly paid to Wilde's backgrounds in Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has had the unintended effect of obscuring a much broader network of transnational contexts. Attention to these contexts allows us to reconsider how we read The Picture of Dorian Gray, what we believe we know about Wilde, and how we understand literary Decadence as both a persistent, highly mobile cultural mode and a precursor to global modernism. In developing a transnational framework for reading Dorian Gray, O'Toole recovers a subterranean network of nineteenth-century cultural movements. At the same time, he joins several active and vital conversations about what it might mean to expand the geographical reach of Victorian studies and to trace the globalization of literature over a longer period of time. Dorian Unbound includes chapters on the Irish Gothic, German historical romance, US magic-picture tradition, and experimental English epigrams, as well as a detailed history and a new close reading of the novel, in an effort to understand Wilde's contribution to a more dynamic idea of Decadence than has been previously known. From its rigorous account of the broad archive of texts that Wilde read and the array of cultural movements from which he drew inspiration in writing Dorian Gray to the novel's afterlives and global resonances, O'Toole paints a richer picture of the author and his famously allusive prose. This book makes a compelling case for a comparative reading of the novel in a global context. It will appeal to historians and admirers of Wilde's career as well as to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, queer and narrative theory, Irish studies, and art history.

Restating Orientalism

Restating Orientalism PDF Author: Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547382
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Since Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism has been singled out for critique as the quintessential example of Western intellectuals’ collaboration with oppression. Controversies over the imbrications of knowledge and power and the complicity of Orientalism in the larger project of colonialism have been waged among generations of scholars. But has Orientalism come to stand in for all of the sins of European modernity, at the cost of neglecting the complicity of the rest of the academic disciplines? In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic thought such as sovereignty and the self. Hallaq traces their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world, interrogating and historicizing the set of causes that permitted modernity to wed knowledge to power. Restating Orientalism offers a bold rethinking of the theory of the author, the concept of sovereignty, and the place of the secular Western self in the modern project, reopening the problem of power and knowledge to an ethical critique and ultimately theorizing an exit from modernity’s predicaments. A remarkably ambitious attempt to overturn the foundations of a wide range of academic disciplines while also drawing on the best they have to offer, Restating Orientalism exposes the depth of academia’s lethal complicity in modern forms of capitalism, colonialism, and hegemonic power.