Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Book Review. Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny. By Gregorio Kohon
No full textGregorio Kohon is a Training Analyst of the British Psychoanaytic Society. He has published numerous psychanalytic writings as well as four books of poetry in Spanish and his novel ‘Red Parrot, Wooden Leg’ was finalist for the Fernanda Lara Prise, Planeta, Barcelona. His next book, ‘Truco Gallo’, is a collection of short stories (also in Spanish, co-authored with Mario Flecha and Viqui Rosenberg)
‘The Universe’: An Unpublished Sonnet by Arthur Symons
Get PDFA steady trickle of sonnets permeates Arthur Symons’s poetical oeuvre. Some of the most iconic pieces from his early volumes are sonnets; examples include ‘The Opium-Smoker’, ‘The Absinthe Drinker’, ‘Nerves’, and ‘Idealism’. In the Arthur Symons Papers held in Firestone Library at Princeton University is an unknown and previously unpublished sonnet entitled ‘The Universe’. The typescript, found among miscellaneous poems, is undated and spattered with blotches (strikethroughs) and a couple of typographic errors. It bears a thematic affinity with some post-Nineties volumes by Symons, comporting with his fixation with evil, sin, and damnation. From these clues we can hazard that Symons penned ‘The Universe’ after his mental breakdown period, possibly in the twenties or the thirties, although the sonnet’s central concept could have originated much earlier. ‘The Universe’ expands and transforms the theme of urban sensuality of Symons’s early work, plotting it on a more abstract plane. It is built around ideas of world-making and Judeo-Christian cosmogony. This is not a slapdash effort; it is an intriguing, puzzling piece, to say the least, and one that realizes the full potential of the sonnet form
Voluptuous Interventionism: An Introductory Note from the Editor-in-Chief
Get PDFDespite the continuing broad interest in Decadence, there has been no interdisciplinary journal of Decadence that looks beyond the nineteenth century for its material or seeks to connect late nineteenth-century Decadent literature with its roots in Roman antiquity and its expression in modern and contemporary literature, art, and culture – until now. As is obvious from the titles of conferences and symposia listed above, Decadence has tended to be absorbed into the broader fields of Nineteenth-century Studies, Victorian literature, and Modernism, and is often viewed in relation to Aestheticism and Fin de Siècle Studies, but this does not do justice to the continuity, complexity, and polyvalence of Decadent literature. Neither does it reflect its intrinsic and fascinating unruliness, the way it calls into question traditional literary categories such as genre and periodization. It was in recognition of the peculiar dimensions and challenges of Decadence that the idea for a journal of Decadence studies was conceived. Volupté was born
Review: Robert Stilling, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)
Get PDFIs Decadence the end or the beginning of a series of existential concerns about personal identity, nationhood, and literary tradition? Robert Stilling’s Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry addresses this important and long-overdue question. He establishes Western Decadence as a crucial model and foundation to postcolonial poetics. Decadence, Stilling argues, served eminent poets and artists such as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo as a springboard to shape their countries’ own poetics either by adapting or rejecting the Decadent writings of prominent nineteenth-century figures such as J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Stilling’s study considers a wide range of postcolonial (European (Irish), South Asian, African, and Caribbean) narratives. He champions the idea of Decadence as an innovative force, one of cultural renovation. Put more figuratively, he considers Decadence as metaphor describing the ‘death in birth’ (p. 36) of the emergence of postcolonial aesthetics. For many writers ‘the postcolonial nation begins in a state of artistic decadence, a decadence not simply imported from the West but composed of those backward-looking elements of indigenous traditions exaggerated by the colonizers’ (p. 63)
The Line of Lilith: Remy de Gourmont’s Demons of Erotic Idealism
Get PDFAccording to medieval tradition, the (male) incubus and (female) succubus were demons who preyed upon their victims by engaging in sexual activity with them. Representations of these spirits can be found in various works by the fin-de-sièclewriter, critic, and poet Remy de Gourmont (1851-1915). In this article, I offer a close textual comparison of the play Lilith (1892) and the short story ‘Péhor’, as well as considering a pseudonymous treatise entitled Les Incubes et les succubes (1897) of which Gourmont is likely the author. In the fin de siècle, as in the middle ages, the incubus or succubus could be found at the centre of western culture’s discourse over abnormal, dangerous, or obscure sexual phenomena. Aware of the prominent place this symbol held in the collective imagination, Gourmont sought to imbue the trope of the demon lover with his own set of phenomenological questions pertaining to the erotic life. Gourmont’s work is perennially concerned with the condition of Eros in a world which, according to idealist principles, is ultimately unknowable except as a projection of the individual mind and the fallible senses. In the texts I shall address, Gourmont extrapolates Arthur Schopenhauer’s neo-Kantian notion of ‘the world as representation’ to the realm of demonology, adopting the incubus and succubus as potent subjective phenomena which contribute to an idealist view of erotic dynamics and interactions.
The Dominion of the Air: the Imperial dimension of Britain’s war in the air, 1914-1918
Get PDFIt is now well established in the historical literature of the First World War that manpower and materiel, provided by the colonies and self-governing dominions, figured importantly in Britain’s war effort. One area, however, in which the war’s imperial dimension has yet to be properly analysed, is the air war – perhaps the very epitome of the ‘total war’ struggle that British society faced between 1914-18. This article evaluates the imperial contribution to Britain’s war in the air. Besides revealing the considerable extent of empire involvement in the British flying services, it demonstrates something of the distinct and nuanced relationships that colonial authorities had with London, and the way this shaped their respective involvement in the empire’s war effort
