19th-Century British Fiction (357-0-20)
Topic
Degenerate, Decadent, and Gothic
Instructors
Johana Staza Godfrey
Meeting Info
University Hall 218: Mon, Wed 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
It's hard to imagine modern alternative culture—the queer aesthetics of the goth 1980s, the drugged-up industrial 1990s, or even Matty Healy of The 1975's swaggering claim that his style is "black and expensive"—without its roots in the fashionable decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. In 1891, four years before his trial for sodomy and indecency, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked the Victorian public with its seductive exploration of queer sensuality, decadence, indulgence, and drug use. What is it about Wilde's rallying cry of "art for art's sake" that was so transgressive? As a survey of nineteenth-century decadent and aesthetic literature, this course unpacks the seedier, darker side of the stiffly corseted Victorians and their cultural afterlives. We will explore key canonical works by authors including Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and recover important aesthetic fantasies by lesser-known writers. Over the course of this class, students will build a foundational understanding of aesthetic theory and learn to interrogate texts through queer and postcolonial frameworks. In addition to reading key Victorian texts, students will unpack Romantic precedents and the ways that these distinctly nineteenth-century preoccupations with decay, degeneracy, and transgression influenced and shaped counterculture through the present day.
Teaching Method
Seminar discussion, short lectures.
Evaluation Method
Participation, presentation on a selection from the decadent magazine The Yellow Book, one analytical essay, final project.
Class Materials (Required)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Edgar Allen Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839); Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Suicide Club" (1878); Vernon Lee, "Oke of Okehurst" (1881); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); selected episodes of What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and Interview with the Vampire (2022); selections from alternative music criticism, fashion magazines, and zines from the 1990s-present.
Texts will be available at: The Picture of Dorian Gray (ISBN 978-0393696875) at Norris, all others on Canvas.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area