Decadent Identities

The course focuses on Decadent literature and culture and their responses to the loss of a unified human identity and their challenge to fundamental presuppositions about sexuality, social norms, and ethics around 1900. In our analyses of works of Russian and European literature and art, we will explore various meanings of the idea of "the decadent", and look at how these works put into play a range of theories of degeneration, evolutionism, the limits of the human, medical diagnostics, mystical ideologies, or criminal anthropology in their search for new models of identity and the world.