Decadence

Literature and Degeneration : the Representation of " Decadence

The Decadence of Mimetic Science: Against Nature 2.0

This Science Fiction Prototype re-imagines the technologies of augmentation which seek to create a space “overlaid” onto our own with a ‘mixed’ reality. It is proposed that this can be seen as an attempt to build an unseen zone that is reminiscent of the aether worlds of the 19th and early 20th Century. Taking an aesthetic developed by the decadent author JK Huysmans to create a neodecadent pro...

The grandeur and decadence of the suburbs Looking back on three decades of analysis of social and political change

“One fine morning, the French woke up to discover that a baobab tree had grown in their garden”. Following the last presidential election, in 2012, this was the sentence that opened an article in Le Monde describing the sudden arrival of periurban areas under the media spotlight as a result of the growing electoral success of the Front National (FN; the French National Front). Although this phe...

Decline and decadence in Iraq and Syria after the age of Avicenna? 'Abd al-Latīf al-Baghdādī (1162-1231) between myth and history.

'Abd al-Latīf al-Baghdādī's (d. 1231) work Book of the Two Pieces of Advice (Kitāb al Nasīhatayn) challenges the idea that Islamic medicine declined after the twelfth century AD. Moreover, it offers some interesting insights into the social history of medicine. 'Abd al-Latīf advocated using the framework of Greek medical epistemology to criticize the rationalist physicians of his day; he argued...

From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? the Goncourt’s “decadent” Eighteenth-century Art Revival

As consummate collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts’ contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article explores a less well-documented aspect of their L’Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latent decadence prior to the term’s fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Ind...