Download or read book Decadent Orientalisms written by David Fieni and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said's claim that Orientalism is a "style of having power," Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts--"truths" that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism's power.
Download or read book Decadent Orientalisms written by David Fieni and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.
Download or read book Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany 1880 1920 written by Katharina Herold-Zanker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical engagement with other cultures. In bringing together two fin-de-siècle European literatures, this comparative study makes a case for the transnational, if not imperial, nature of Decadence. The East emerges as an 'indispensable' mediator between various versions of European Decadence. The book examines the role of the East with specific reference to selected English and German authors: starting from Oscar Wilde's Victorian vision of Egypt and Arthur Symons's and Violet Fane's image of Constantinople, it moves to Paul Scheerbart's and Else Lasker-Schüler's Decadent Babylon and Assyria and concludes by turning to Stefan George's exclusion of the East from his poetic practice. The geographical reach of the East focuses on regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. The cultural translation of specifically the Middle East into different European national contexts gains new—sometimes oppositional—meanings, avoiding a one-sided representation of both the East and the two national literatures that absorbed it. In arguing for a Decadent cosmopolitanism as a model of heterogeneous inclusivity that reaches beyond the binaries established by Edward Said's Orientalism, the present book brings twenty-first century theories of cosmopolitanism into dialogue with art history and literature to uncover striking synergies and interdependences between the different manifestations of Decadence in England and Germany.
Download or read book Decadent Orientalisms written by David Anthony Fieni and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the relationship between ideas about decadence and the discourse of Orientalism in French and Arabic literature and society since the nineteenth century. By tracing the genealogy of French Orientalism in the Arab world, this dissertation shows how colonial modernity emerges from these imbricated discourses of power, and how Orientalist notions of decadence become an internalized feature of postcolonial society. An analysis of the "secular" reformist ideas of Ernest Renan, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Farah&dotbelow; Ant&dotbelow;un, and 'Abd al-Rah&dotbelow;man al-Kawakibi demonstrates that Arabic and Islamic intellectuals were only able to secure their own modernity by first confessing to their decadence. I show how language itself, in works by the Lebanese writer Ah&dotbelow;mad Faris al-Shidyaq and the Frenchman Celine, is made to enact specific historical transformations and to exhibit symptoms of generation and corruption suffered by a supposedly "authentic" social body. The carnivalesque novels of these two authors ultimately make visible the limits of the colonial discourse of the symptom. In describing the passage from colonial decadence to postcolonial decadence, this dissertation narrates the fate of Orientalism as a decadent engine of colonial modernity. I argue that language politics in independent Algeria represents the "success" of the Orientalist discourse that was disseminated in both the Maghreb and the Near East during the time of colonial rule, but which now functions autonomously and internally, as different factions accuse the others of being both decadent and inauthentic. I analyze an Algerian francophone novel, L'invention du desert, by Tahir Djaout, and an Algerian novel in Arabic, al-Zilzal (The Earthquake), by Tahar Wattar in order to illustrate the agonistic relationship between two ways of imagining post-colonial Algeria. Finally, I explore contemporary French debates surrounding immigration, secularism, and the role of mass media, contextualizing these issues within the discursive structures of Orientalism and decadence as they have been elaborated in earlier chapters. My reading of two novels by the Franco-Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb argues that the "virtual secularization" of the sacred Arabic script in the author's French texts inscribes the practices of global Islam into the circuits of Europe as a radical "cure" for postmodern decadence.
Download or read book Hotel Modernisms written by Anna Despotopoulou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukács, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of “hotel modernisms” as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.
Download or read book Staging Decadence written by Adam Alston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is decadence being staged today as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse and what might lie in its wake.
Download or read book Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany 1880 1920 written by Katharina Herold-Zanker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written in England and Germany, exploring the relationship between Orientalism, Decadence, and cosmopolitanism, arguing that representations of the East played a critical role in the literary landscape of Decadence over this period.
Download or read book French Decadence in a Global Context written by Julia Hartley and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadence is seldom looked at in the context of colonialism, and yet its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s is directly contemporary with the expansion of France’s modern colonial empire. Ever a slippery signifier, Decadence figures alternately as pro-colonial, anticolonial and apolitical. This edited volume gives a sense of the sheer range and diversity of intersections between colonialism and Decadence, from anticolonial anarchist writers to colonial discourse, from nineteenth-century women writers to our contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. Different chapters explore these intersections in the cultural imagination of dance, the novel, travel writing, historiographical theory, and literary networks. Decadence is often seen as an essentially metropolitan, urban movement, but this study identifies key spaces elsewhere, from fin-de-siècle Saigon to India in the heyday of French colonialism, from Byzantium to ancient Persia. Although the colonies were held up by some as an antidote to the threat of French decline, other writings reveal anxiety that the antidote might itself be a form of poison. Colonial contact might exacerbate degeneration, whether through cultural mixing or through the violence of colonial aggression itself. A profound anxiety about French identity and France’s so-called mission civilisatrice is played out through the imagery, the style and the pose of Decadence.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins written by Clive Bloom and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research on the Gothic Revival. The Gothic Revival was based on emotion rather than reason and when Horace Walpole created Strawberry Hill House, a gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, he had to create new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle. Nevertheless, Walpole’s house produced nightmares and his book The Castle of Otranto was the first truly gothic novel, with supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements challenging the emergent fiction of social relationships. The novel’s themes of violence, tragedy, death, imprisonment, castle battlements, dungeons, fair maidens, secrets, ghosts and prophecies led to a new genre encompassing prose, theatre, poetry and painting, whilst opening up a whole world of imagination for entrepreneurial female writers such as Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie and Ann Radcliffe, whose immensely popular books led to the intense inner landscapes of the Bronte sisters. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk created a new gothic: atheistic, decadent, perverse, necrophilic and hellish. The social upheaval of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Romantic movement with its more intense (and often) atheistic self-absorption led the gothic into darker corners of human experience with a greater emphasis on the inner life, hallucination, delusion, drug addiction, mental instability, perversion and death and the emerging science of psychology. The intensity of the German experience led to an emphasis on doubles and schizophrenic behaviour, ghosts, spirits, mesmerism, the occult and hell. This volume charts the origins of this major shift in social perceptions and completes a trilogy of Palgrave Handbooks on the Gothic—combined they provide an exhaustive survey of current research in Gothic studies, a go-to for students and researchers alike.
Download or read book Dorian Unbound written by Sean O'Toole and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Building upon a large body of archival and critical work on Oscar Wilde's only novel, Dorian Unbound offers a new account of the importance of transnational contexts in the forging of Wilde's imagination and the wider genealogy of literary Decadence. Sean O'Toole argues that the attention critics have rightly paid to Wilde's backgrounds in Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has had the unintended effect of obscuring a much broader network of transnational contexts. Attention to these contexts allows us to reconsider how we read The Picture of Dorian Gray, what we believe we know about Wilde, and how we understand literary Decadence as both a persistent, highly mobile cultural mode and a precursor to global modernism. In developing a transnational framework for reading Dorian Gray, O'Toole recovers a subterranean network of nineteenth-century cultural movements. At the same time, he joins several active and vital conversations about what it might mean to expand the geographical reach of Victorian studies and to trace the globalization of literature over a longer period of time. Dorian Unbound includes chapters on the Irish Gothic, German historical romance, US magic-picture tradition, and experimental English epigrams, as well as a detailed history and a new close reading of the novel, in an effort to understand Wilde's contribution to a more dynamic idea of Decadence than has been previously known. From its rigorous account of the broad archive of texts that Wilde read and the array of cultural movements from which he drew inspiration in writing Dorian Gray to the novel's afterlives and global resonances, O'Toole paints a richer picture of the author and his famously allusive prose. This book makes a compelling case for a comparative reading of the novel in a global context. It will appeal to historians and admirers of Wilde's career as well as to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, queer and narrative theory, Irish studies, and art history.
Download or read book Orientalism written by Edward W. Said and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
Download or read book U S Orientalisms written by Malini Johar Schueller and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers the roots of Americans' construction of the "Orient" by examining the work of nineteenth-century authors
Download or read book Nordic Orientalism written by Elisabeth Oxfeldt and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nordic Orientalism explores the appropriation of Oriental imagery within Danish and Norwegian nineteenth-century nation-building. The project queries Edward Said''s binary notion of Orientalism and posits a more complex model describing how European countries on the periphery ? Denmark and Norway ? imported Oriental imagery from France to position themselves, not against their colonial Other, but in relation to central European nations. Examining Nordic Orientalism across a century in the context of modernization, urbanization and democratization the study furthermore shows how the Romanticists? naive treatment of the Orient was challenged by increased contact with the "real" Orient.
Download or read book Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World written by Filippo Carlà-Uhink and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is Cleopatra, a descendent of Alexander the Great, a Ptolemy from a Greek–Macedonian family, in popular imagination an Oriental woman? True, she assumed some aspects of pharaonic imagery in order to rule Egypt, but her Orientalism mostly derives from ancient (Roman) and modern stereotypes: both the Orient and the idea of a woman in power are signs, in the Western tradition, of 'otherness' – and in this sense they can easily overlap and interchange. This volume investigates how ancient women, and particularly powerful women, such as queens and empresses, have been re-imagined in Western (and not only Western) arts; highlights how this re-imagination and re-visualization is, more often than not, the product of Orientalist stereotypes – even when dealing with women who had nothing to do with Eastern regions; and compares these images with examples of Eastern gaze on the same women. Through the chapters in this volume, readers will discover the similarities and differences in the ways in which women in power were and still are described and decried by their opponents.
Download or read book American Orientalism written by Douglas Little and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Douglas Little explores the stormy American relationship with the Middle East from World War II through the war in Iraq, focusing particularly on the complex and often inconsistent attitudes and interests that helped put the United States on a collision course with radical Islam early in the new millennium. After documenting the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture, Little examines oil, Israel, and other aspects of U.S. policy. He concludes that a peculiar blend of arrogance and ignorance has led American officials to overestimate their ability to shape events in the Middle East from 1945 through the present day, and that it has been a driving force behind the Iraq war. For this updated third edition, Little covers events through 2007, including a new chapter on the Bush Doctrine, demonstrating that in many important ways, George W. Bush's Middle Eastern policies mark a sharp break with the past.
Download or read book Alberto Pinto Orientalism written by Alberto Pinto and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alberto Pinto is among the most celebrated interior designers at work today. Here he turns his eye to the wonders of the East and a series of interiors inspired by the colors and textures of Morocco, Byzantium, India, and beyond. Included in this book are interiors in Europe, North America, and North Africa belonging to the jet set and modern elite. Each interior celebrates opulence, whether with fine damasks and silks, intricate tilework, or glittering objets d'art. Included are other visual stage sets for living that are as breathtaking as they are original-vast terraces over sumptuous gardens, shimmering swimming pools open to the sea and sky, filtered light bouncing off floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflecting an infinity of precious woods in an exquisite parquet floor. Pinto designs spaces to delight the senses, and the publication of Orientalism will usher in a new era of sensuality in interior design. Alberto Pinto is among the most celebrated interior designers at work today. Here he turns his eye to the wonders of the East and a series of interiors inspired by the colors and textures of Morocco, Byzantium, India, and beyond. Included in this book are interiors in Europe, North America, and North Africa belonging to the jet set and modern elite. Each interior celebrates opulence, whether with fine damasks and silks, intricate tilework, or glittering objets d'art. Included are other visual stage sets for living that are as breathtaking as they are original-vast terraces over sumptuous gardens, shimmering swimming pools open to the sea and sky, filtered light bouncing off floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflecting an infinity of precious woods in an exquisite parquet floor. Pinto designs spaces to delight the senses, and the publication of Orientalism will usher in a new era of sensuality in interior design.
Download or read book Orientalism written by Macfie A. L. Macfie and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period of decolonisation that followed the end of the Second World War a number of scholars, mainly Middle Eastern, launched a sustained assault on Orientalism - the theory and practice of representing 'the Orient' in Western thought -accusing its practitioners of misrepresentation, prejudice and bias. As a result an intense debate occurred regarding the validity of the charges made, involving not only Orientalists but students of history, anthropology, sociology, women's studies and the media. Orientalism: A Reader provides the student with a selection of key readings from this debate, covering a range of areas including myth, imperialism, the cultural perspective, Marxist interpretation and feminist attitudes.The origins and character of the debate on Orientalism are introduced, as well as the intellectual foundations of the assault made and the nature of the debate which ensued. Coverage begins with nineteenth-century material from thinkers such as Hegel and Marx, and moves through extracts from Nietzsche, Gramsci and Foucault to contemporary work from, for example, Bryan Turner, John MacKenzie and Edward Said. As well as a general introduction, each section is introduced and the extracts are placed in context to guide the student carefully through this complex debate.
