The Past is Never Dead: Decadent Nostalgia in the French Fin de Siècle

Doherty, Ryan Atticus

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Year:: 2023
Contributor:: Doherty, Ryan Atticus (creator); Schultz, Gretchen (Advisor); Wills, David (Reader); Hawthorne, Melanie (Reader); Brown University. Department of French Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Nostalgia; Rachilde, 1860-1953; Decadence (Literary movement); Degeneration; Nostalgia in literature; History of psychology; joséphin péladan; Lorrain, Jean, 1855-1906; maurice barrès; Huysmans, J.-K. (Joris-Karl), 1848-1907; Theology; Uncanny, The (Psychoanalysis), in literature
Extent:: x, 284 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation addresses the changing signification of the concept of nostalgia in the late nineteenth century, a period when it shifted from being a largely spatial medical diagnosis to taking on the colloquial sense of a bittersweet longing for the past for which it is known today. Drawing upon medical and psychiatric history, aesthetics, and theories of temporality, this project examines the various manifestations of nostalgia within the writings of the French decadent period during the Belle Époque (1870-1914). Focusing around five authors, the corpus of this dissertation is oriented towards providing a varied and nuanced view on how writing from this time and within this broader aesthetic category bears witness to the phenomenology of the modern notion of nostalgia. The writers of this corpus, whose works are analyzed in succeeding chapters, mobilize iterations of nostalgic longing to shape the valences by which the topic has come to be known: these take the form, respectively, of Péladan’s use of nostalgia to deploy a pseudo-Catholic, quasi-occult vision of restoring latinité, the heritage of the Latin world; Rachilde, where nostalgia takes on a metaphysical form, in which she manipulates the idea of past purity to establish conceptions of womanhood and its role in society; in Jean Lorrain, nostalgia is reversed – begging the question, “What happens when the intrusion of the past is not desired, but appears unexpectedly?”; in Maurice Barrès’ work, nostalgia is mobilized as a means of resistance against the dehumanization of modernity, which “uproots” individuals from the social networks that give them existential structure; and finally, in the works of J.-K. Huysmans, nostalgia facilitates the movement of the decadent subject from world-weariness to reversion to orthodox faith, in a gesture that moves outside of the linearity of time. More broadly, this dissertation aims to conceptualize both nostalgia and decadence through this shifting relationship to time and to contextualize the late nineteenth century within a historical and philosophical framework, allowing for a greater understanding of how these concepts have come to bear on the modern world.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023

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Doherty, Ryan Atticus, "The Past is Never Dead: Decadent Nostalgia in the French Fin de Siècle" (2023). French Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:wyh52y93/

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French Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the French Studies department.
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