ENG 5933 Fall 2021 Stilling

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 colonialism, global migration, secularization, and other contemporary crises.