High Culture: Intoxicants in 19th-Century Literature and Society

This seminar explores the cultural significance of intoxicants in 19th-century France. Between the wine of transcendence and creation and the opiates of degeneration and disease, alcohol and narcotics played a role in antithetical discourses of fulfillment and depletion. Their idealization commonly found witnesses among poets, while the social sciences roundly condemned their deleterious effects on the material and social body. Advances in medicine contributed new intoxicants available for abuse (ether, morphine), even while feeding discourses condemning alcoholism and drug use as social scourges. Primary readings include literature (Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Zola, Lorrain), medical treatises, social policy. Taught in English.