De "The Picture of Dorian Gray" de Oscar Wilde al "Dorian Gray" de Corominas: Análisis de una transducción interartística, ¿lograda?

Partiendo del concepto de transducción interartística de Wellek, este artículo se propone llevar a la práctica el caso de The Picture of Dorian Gray de Oscar Wilde adaptado por Corominas. Un ejemplo de transducción interartística de lo más interesante y arriesgado tanto más cuanto que se trata de ofrecer un clásico literario de la Inglaterra del siglo XIX a un público visual, y no forzosamente de letras, en los albores del siglo XXI, mediante el Noveno Arte. Por otra parte, este álbum presenta otra originalidad y es que fue publicado y, de hecho, traducido al francés antes de ser editado en España, lo que duplica su transducción, en este caso, lingüística: Todo un reto, tanto para el dibujante y guionista Corominas como para la traductora Carole Rattclif.

Outrageous: Defending the art of free expression

This essay makes a critical defence of free expression through the spirit of outrageousness. Drawing upon the ideas of Oscar Wilde, along with artists such as Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Gilbert and George and Jake and Dinos Chapman, it looks beyond the current attempts to reduce the question of freedom to quintessential liberal tropes. In doing so, the paper both offers a critique of the moral absolutism that’s taken over certain sectors of the so-called ‘radical left’, while demanding more political appreciation for creatives and those with the abilities to reimagine the human subject. Such a critique not only suggests the need to rethink the meaning for freedom beyond the play of libertarians, but it also calls forth a new political subjectivity who appears timely and yet timeless – the much maligned and theoretically ignored figure of the infidel, who allows us to break free from moral entrapments.

Oscar Wilde’s Misattributions: A Legacy of Gross Indecency

Drawing on correspondence and periodical advertising as well as paratextual and bibliographic detail, this paper compares editions of the three most prominent texts falsely associated with Oscar Wilde: The Green Carnation (1894), an intimate satire on Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas actually written by Douglas’ friend Robert Smythe Hichens; “The Priest and the Acolyte” (1894), a paedophilic story written by John Francis Bloxam and presented as evidence against Wilde during his libel trial and then privately reprinted; and the erotic novel Teleny (1893), which is still attributed to Wilde today. His name appeared in tandem with these novels over the course of a century, linking him further with sex and scandal. Two separate editions of Teleny in 1984 and 1986 feature introductions by Winston Leyland and John McRae, respectively justifying Wilde’s authorship and describing the work as likely a round-robin pornographic collaboration between Wilde and his young friends. By recognising and exposing these cases of literary impersonation, we can amend Wilde’s legacy.

The paradoxical self: duality and ambiguity in the works and lives of Oscar Wilde and Morrissey

Oscar Wilde’s and Morrissey’s lives seem to be full of contradictions. Their art constitutes a reaction against materialism, traditional lifestyle and social standards, as well as defence of individualism and freedom of thought. So far, their works have been analysed only from a very limited perspective of the tension between aesthetics and ethics. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that what prevails in their art is the state of ambivalence and ambiguity in relation to the issues connected with religion and morality, innocence and experience, life and death. This article aims at demonstrating multiplicity of personalities of the artists mentioned and ethical ambivalences of their works. Taken together, Wilde and Morrissey’s creative outputs present a clash between different spheres of life, the divided consciousness and the split between body and soul. Thus, the oscillation between opposite standpoints and values excluding each other is not only the result of the artists’ personal experience but it may symbolise the paradox and absurdity of the human existence as well.

Towards an Ethical Aestheticism: Christianity, Christhood and Martyrdom in the Fiction of Oscar Wilde

<p>Oscar Wilde is part of our world. With his dandyish witticisms and decadent demeanour, he continues to serve as a model of subversive grace, an aesthetic beacon drawing his readers towards a lighthouse of beauty, even more than a century after his death. Few would suspect that Wilde’s work should offer any ethical guidance, given the tendency of fin-de-siècle aestheticism to place artistic beauty above ethical concerns. It is the purpose of this thesis to argue otherwise. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it intends to show that Wilde’s fiction, from his early fairy stories to his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is connected by a common interest in Christian ethics. Second, and more ambitiously, it intends to disprove the notion that aestheticism and ethics are irreconcilable. Throughout his work, Wilde develops an image of an aesthetic Jesus Christ, a martyr of beauty. Wilde dedicates much of his fictional oeuvre to illustrating this vision of Christ, usually through martyrdom and the relinquishment of selfhood. In doing so, this thesis argues that he connects artistic beauty with Christian ethics, synthesising an ethical aestheticism, only achievable through self-sacrifice in service of love – the aesthetic ideal. This kind of aesthetic martyrdom is present throughout Wilde’s fiction, the most commonly cited examples coming from two of his early fairy stories, “The Happy Prince” and “The Nightingale and the Rose” respectively. In these stories, the titular characters work to realise the vision of the aesthetic Christ – what this thesis calls his ‘aesthetic ideal’ – and achieve a higher appreciation of beauty, both bodily and immaterial. Christianity, this thesis finally argues, is the basis for Wilde’s ethical aestheticism and it is Christian ethics that Wilde uses to orientate his readers towards aesthetic Christhood, not with the cold, judging hand of a Victorian preacher but the warm, caring shoulder-pat of an aesthetic father-figure.</p>

Introduction

This introduction argues that even though decadence and culture are incompatible concepts, the former based on the idea of decay and the latter on the concept of growth, decadence is a type of culture in its own right, however much it may go against the grain of culture at large. This basic paradox is evident in the literature produced by such figures as Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Rachilde, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and many others, all of whom drew creative energy from a sense of historical decline, philosophical pessimism, and sexual perversity. Moreover, the culture of decadence concerns not only forms of aesthetic expression such as literature and art, but also sensuous, lived experience, however self-destructive such experience might be. This “lived decadence,” moreover, was—and is—available not only to artists and writers on the margins of society but also to the economically secure and socially ascendant bourgeoisie, the beneficiaries of that very modernity so many decadents set themselves against.

Towards an Ethical Aestheticism: Christianity, Christhood and Martyrdom in the Fiction of Oscar Wilde

<p>Oscar Wilde is part of our world. With his dandyish witticisms and decadent demeanour, he continues to serve as a model of subversive grace, an aesthetic beacon drawing his readers towards a lighthouse of beauty, even more than a century after his death. Few would suspect that Wilde’s work should offer any ethical guidance, given the tendency of fin-de-siècle aestheticism to place artistic beauty above ethical concerns. It is the purpose of this thesis to argue otherwise. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it intends to show that Wilde’s fiction, from his early fairy stories to his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is connected by a common interest in Christian ethics. Second, and more ambitiously, it intends to disprove the notion that aestheticism and ethics are irreconcilable. Throughout his work, Wilde develops an image of an aesthetic Jesus Christ, a martyr of beauty. Wilde dedicates much of his fictional oeuvre to illustrating this vision of Christ, usually through martyrdom and the relinquishment of selfhood. In doing so, this thesis argues that he connects artistic beauty with Christian ethics, synthesising an ethical aestheticism, only achievable through self-sacrifice in service of love – the aesthetic ideal. This kind of aesthetic martyrdom is present throughout Wilde’s fiction, the most commonly cited examples coming from two of his early fairy stories, “The Happy Prince” and “The Nightingale and the Rose” respectively. In these stories, the titular characters work to realise the vision of the aesthetic Christ – what this thesis calls his ‘aesthetic ideal’ – and achieve a higher appreciation of beauty, both bodily and immaterial. Christianity, this thesis finally argues, is the basis for Wilde’s ethical aestheticism and it is Christian ethics that Wilde uses to orientate his readers towards aesthetic Christhood, not with the cold, judging hand of a Victorian preacher but the warm, caring shoulder-pat of an aesthetic father-figure.</p>

Mire’s Interpretation of the Tragic and Paradoxical World of Oscar Wilde

This article analyzes the reception of the figure of O. Wilde, the 19th-century English writer, and his works in the prose and criticism of Alexandra Mikhailovna Moiseeva (1874-1913), who entered the history of Russian literature of the Silver Age by the name of “Mire”. The study focuses mainly on her story Black Panther (1909), in which the author provides an original perspective on the tragic love episode in Wilde’s life. Attention is also paid to the thematic similarities between the works of Wilde and Mire in terms of genre, plot and literary image, as well as Mire’s interpretation of Wilde’s works in her critical reviews.

Archaeologies of Gossip: AIDS in Contemporary Gay Fiction

<p>Queer criticism is now in its third decade and, as critical orthodoxy, running up against its own limitations. What, for example, is a discipline preoccupied with the unspoken, the marginal and the blurring of gender boundaries to do with Edmund White’s unambiguously gay, masculine “red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon”? The Western AIDS novel is, overwhelmingly, a product of a historically precise, explicitly gay, male experience. This thesis seeks unapologetically to engage with this writing on its own terms, eschewing the queer critical lens as insufficient, and, rather, reading for a specifically gay aesthetic. Grounded in a broader overview of both AIDS novels and existing criticism, this thesis consists of extended close readings of two exemplary AIDS novels: Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Firstly, I articulate the centrality of the gay sexual body to the representation of AIDS in The Farewell Symphony, tracing its representation of the disease through the epidemiological mapping of the virus itself, within the highly specific culture of gay New York in the 1970s. Secondly, I examine the way in which the re-imagination of a selective tradition of gay literary predecessors in The Line of Beauty, specifically Henry James and Oscar Wilde, provides an aesthetic solution to articulating AIDS.</p>