Volodymyr Vynnychenko and the Early Ukrainian Decadent Film (1917–1918).

The article is focused on the phenomenon of the early Ukrainian decadent cinema, in particular, in relation to filmings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s dramaturgy. One of the brightest examples of ‘film decadence’ in Vynnychenko’s oevre is “The Lie” directed by Vyacheslav Vyskovs’ky in 1918, discovered recently in the film archives. This film displays the principles of ‘ethical symbolism’, ‘dark’ expressionist aesthetics and remains the unique masterpiece of specifically Ukranian film decadence

Review of Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques by Maggie Tonkin

Review of Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques by Maggie Tonki

What is Decadent Philosophy?

Decadence in philosophy is the reversal between thinking and truth: philosophical truths valued only insofar as they provoke more philosophical thought

Not a comeback : the persistence of decadence in film noir

English Senior Honors ThesisIn this thesis, I will argue that the decadent movement survives in twentieth-century America through noir films, or what I refer to as "noir decadence." However, noir films make decadence more accessible to a wider audience through a change in perspective and more complicated depictions of class and gender. The first section of this thesis, "The Decadence of Film Noir," compares and contrasts fin-de-siecle decadence and noir decadence through the noir film Sunset Boulevard. This section also discusses the shift in the narrator's perspective to set up the discussion of narrative structure, characters, and how they come together to form a perspective that makes decadence accessible to mass audiences. "Narrative Structure," the second section, examines the way fin-de-siecle decadent narratives are constructed and how that relates to noir decadence. The third section, "Primary Characters," discusses the noir detective archetype, the fin-de-siecle decadent dandy, and the shared character of the "femme fatale." Finally, the conclusion extends noir decadence into the twenty-first-century and examines the perseverance of decadence in neo-noir films

Minding Literature’s Business: Cultivating a Sense of Evanescence Within Political Affairs

The paper investigates the relationship between political oratory and literature in Romania during the second part of the 19th century. Extending the theories of Jacques Rancière, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižec, and Leonidas Donskis, I analyze the relationship between politics and literature by comparing a set of illustrative speeches delivered by Take Ionescu and P. P. Carp, who distinguished themselves as brilliant political orators and also as personalities who gave up literature in order to assume a political career. My main goal is to determine how much of one’s appetite for aesthetic autonomy turns into mere appetite for political autonomy, and thus for dissent and dissidence. Both examples chosen for illustration brought me to the conclusion that prior literary habits and practices into a politician’s public career can determine his/her ways of legitimizing party-switches or volatile doctrinarian attitudes

The Baroque: Beads in a Rosary or Folds in Time

When Benedetto Croce associated the baroque with decadence he was developing a current of critical thinking which had construed the term ‘baroque’ pejoratively since the seventeenth century. This essay explores the idea of a baroque that is neither pejorative nor ‘early modern'’ by outlining the etymology and history of the term ‘baroque’, tracing its chequered history as a term of abuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through Benedetto Croce's characterization of the baroque as ‘decadent’, to two radically different ways of interpreting the baroque adopted by Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze. This paper asks whether we might consider the baroque not as decadent, but as antidote to decadence, of baroque as troubling the smooth waters of a linear historicism

Decline and decadence in Iraq and Syria after the age of Avicenna? : ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (1162–1231) between myth and history

‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī’s (d. 1231) work Book of the Two Pieces of Advice (Kitāb al Nasīḥatayn) 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-Laṭīf advocated using the framework of Greek medical epistemology to criticize the rationalist physicians of his day; he argued that female and itinerant practitioners, relying on experience, were superior to some rationalists. He lambasted contemporaneous medical education because it put too much faith in a restricted number of textbooks such as the Canon by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037) or imperfect abridgments

Degeneracy of Decadent Dyons

A quarter-BPS dyon in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory is generically `decadent' in that it is stable only in some regions of the moduli space and decays on submanifolds in the moduli space. Using this fact, and from the degeneracy of the system close to the decay, a new derivation for the degeneracy of such dyons is given. The degeneracy obtained from these very simple physical considerations is in precise agreement with the results obtained from index computations in all known cases. Similar considerations apply to dyons in $\mathcal{N}=2$ gauge theories. The relation between the $\mathcal{N} =4$ field theory dyons and those counted by the Igusa cusp form in toroidally compactified heterotic string is elucidated.Comment: Some typos corrected and references adde

Iqbal and Goethe : a note

The recourse to Goethe plays an important role in the work of Mohammad Iqbal (1873-1938), one of the few important writers from the Indian subcontinent who knew German literature. Iqbal situates his own writing in the context of western colonial expansion and the corresponding world-historical loss of power of Islam in the East. The recourse to Goethe becomes an import reference point in his work. It enables him to stylise himself as a Messenger of the East in reply to Goethe as a representative of the West. By establishing a comparative cultural constellation with his German predecessor Iqbal affirms a cultural position consisting of a mode of historical complaint and cultural revival