Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laleen Jayamanne
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Aesthetic

Raul Ruiz’s film on Klimt and Gustav Klimt’s own work are examined in terms of a cluster of related ideas; namely allegory, fragmentation, and ornamentation. Modern allegory, whether cinematic or painterly, is shown to have powers of fragmenting organic forms. Similarly, modern ornamentation is elaborated as a power to dematerialize solid forms reaching towards the infinitesimal in perception. Through these devices of allegorical ornamentation, the Ruizean cinematic image and sound are imbued with polysemia and corresponding pathic sates of intensity. The role of the cinematic closeup in facilitating these processes of fragmentation is also examined. The multi-ethnic polity of fin-de-siècle Vienna on the brink of its dissolution is perceived through the aesthetic optic of a delirious Klimt on his deathbed.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...

“What Is to Come After This?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
To Come ◽  
Socialist Art ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Weir
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

The Introduction first considers the etymological and historical meanings of decadence. Different interpretations of the word “decadence” point to historical decline, social decay, and aesthetic inferiority. Decadence today may be best understood as the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude toward modernity, which first arose in nineteenth-century France and is best expressed by the author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Decadence then “travelled” to London, where Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) became the preeminent decadent writer. Other metropolitan centers that made up part of the urban geography of decadence during the fifty-year period (1880–1930) of decadence’s peak were fin-de-siècle Vienna and Weimar Berlin.

Reconsidering Joyce's Exiles in its Theatrical Context

2003 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIRSTEN SHEPHERD-BARR
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Key Questions

James Joyce's one extant play, Exiles, has never been held in great critical esteem. But rather than viewing it as an aberration in the Joyce canon, a fairer reading of the play takes into consideration the play's own theatrical context: what contemporary dramatists were doing both in print and on stage, what evidence there is of Joyce's own theatrical interests and what models he may have used in his own playwriting. The conclusion is that Joyce, surprisingly, wrote neither a ‘bad’ Edwardian play nor a slavishly Ibsenist one, but a pastiche of Victorian and Symbolist drama that roots the play firmly in the theatrical currents of the 1890s. In addition, Harold Pinter's landmark productions of the play in 1970 and 1971 revealed affinities with postmodernist drama, so that the play looks forward as well as back – it is simply not of its own time. If Exiles seems out of step with the developments of modernism, that is largely because it takes its inspiration from the European experimental theatre of the fin de siécle – not from the theatrical world of the Dadaists, Joyce's contemporaries. While this realization may not rehabilitate Exiles into the modernist canon or indeed the theatrical one, looking at the play's context and history raises key questions about the role of theatre and performance in the historiography of modernism.

scholarly journals Culture and corruption in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Em Tese ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Paulo Augusto de Melo Wagatsuma
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article analyses the supposed moral decadence in Oscar Wilde's novel<br />based on the aesthetic trends of his time as well as his writings on the same<br />topic and politics. It is argued that behind the horror tale of Dorian Gray's<br />life lies a veiled critique to fin-de-siècle Victorian society.

From Metapsychology to Magnetic Gnosis: An Esoteric Context for Interpreting Traumatic Modes of Transcendence in Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary and Elizabeth Severn's The Discovery of the Self

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-323
Author(s):  
John Boyle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Clinical Diary ◽  
Clinical Diary ◽  
Mutual Analysis ◽  
Academic Study

It has been argued that the essential themes in Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1932) centre around three major axes (theoretical, technical and personal). This paper proposes a fourth: namely, an occult or esoteric axis. To make the case for its presence in the Clinical Diary, the article provides a brief introduction to the academic study of Western esotericism in order to more adequately situate its proximate fin de siècle occult precursors vis-à-vis psychoanalytic metapsychology. A brief account of Ferenczi's correspondence with Freud on the role of the occult in psychoanalysis is then provided. This constitutes the necessary context for embarking upon an investigation into the ‘psychognostic’ metapsychology co-developed during the course of Ferenczi's ‘mutual analysis’ with the so-called ‘evil genius’, Elizabeth Severn. By way of conclusion, James Grotstein's account of a ‘numinous and immanent psychoanalytic subject’ is highlighted as the locus for a synergistic rapprochement between pre-Freudian and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the subject congruent with the ‘Orphic trajectory’ outlined in this paper.

Medical New Women I: Nurses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Diagnostic Tools ◽  
New Women ◽  
Medical Technologies ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Gender Knowledge

The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and systems of knowledge came into use. The fourth chapter considers the medical New Women who, through new diagnostic tools as well as their admission to the institutional technology of the hospital, entered new spaces and roles as nurses. It locates the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the earlier Nightingale New Style nurse. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, A Woman With Tenacity of Purpose (1900) as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, the chapter explores the role of modern medical technologies in the formation of notions of gender, knowledge and medical authority.

When a Bestselling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance: Collaboration, Networks and Theatre at the Fin de Siècle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hindson
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Collaboration Networks ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Leisure Industry ◽  
Theatrical Culture

This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and actresses, and the professional opportunities that were then opening for them. It also shows the importance of a growing celebrity culture, and the complexity of the interactions between theatre, politics, religion, gender and theatrical production. It shows that even avant-garde theatre, concerned with such archetypal fin-de-siècle concerns as the occult and mysticism, were still deeply implicated in, and made possible by, a growing leisure industry.

The Fragmentary Condition of Aesthetics at the Turn of 21st Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
Kamil Lipiński
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Cultural Education ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Critical Aesthetics ◽  
Point Of Departure

The ‘fragmentary condition’ relates to Jena Romanticism as the point of departure to discuss how the idea of the fragment moves from classical, literary studies to contemporary art and becomes part of a broader interpretation of the 20th century fin de siècle aesthetics. The article builds on Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s theoretical insights into Jena Romanticism in order to examine the unification of all genres separated from poetry to touch poetry, philosophy, rhetoric through the anecdotal and witty articulation, as well as ars combinatoria. For Romantics, the basic imperative was to educate, form their existence, that is, Bildung, in Hegelian terms, cultural education, formation, development. This literary foundation is defined by Jean-Luc Nancy as a fragmentary existence which he identifies with the fraction, fractal essence, inherent separation, disengaging. Nancy was intent on examining the emergence of various contemporary works expressing their essence in terms of breaks, incompleteness, and an autonomous role of the fragment. This classical conceptual foundation provides these key conceptual and methodological perspectives and allows for discussing the implications of the critical aesthetics of the fin de siècle for the practices of fraction, ex-peau-sition, spacing, and division in the contemporary research in art.

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