ENG 5933 Stilling Spring 2021

Since the nineteenth century, literary “decadence” has long been associated with the end of great periods in history, the decline of nations and empires, with a poetics that turns away from the world, with sexual deviance and moral degeneracy, and an obsession with art for its own sake. Nevertheless, as much recent scholarship has shown, the concept of decadence has expanded to capture the perennial sense of crisis and decline that characterizes modernity right up to our present moment. This course will begin with familiar fin-de-siècle decadents such as Oscar Wilde and J.-K. Huysmans but will quickly move through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to survey how literary decadence has evolved in the face of empire, decolonization, global migration, secularization, and the global climate crisis. We will read across several genres (fiction, poetry, film) and a range of European, colonial, and postcolonial writers and critics.