TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pittel, Harald
T1  - Fin du globe
BT  - Oscar Wilde’s romance with decadence and the idea of world literature
JF  - Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology
N2  - This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays. Wilde's implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around 'decadence' in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word 'romance' rather than 'decadence' (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the 'love of things impossible'. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde's thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism.
KW  - debt
KW  - decadence
KW  - planetarity
KW  - romance
KW  - world literature
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621994702
SN  - 0725-5136
SN  - 1461-7455
VL  - 162
IS  - 1
SP  - 121
EP  - 136
PB  - Sage
CY  - London
ER  -