COML 6551

Decadence and the Modern Novel

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2020-2021.

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent writing, "It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania."  We associate this aesthetic with Oscar Wilde in English, but we will explore it as a modernist innovation also for more recent canonical novelists, from Henry James to Thomas Pynchon.

When Offered Fall.

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