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literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays.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 - TY - JOUR A1 - Adamik, Verena T1 - Making worlds from literature BT - W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess JF - Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology N2 - While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims. KW - African American literature KW - Eurocentrism KW - genre KW - intertextuality KW - race Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621993308 SN - 0725-5136 SN - 1461-7455 VL - 162 IS - 1 SP - 105 EP - 120 PB - Sage CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - März, Moses Alexander T1 - Imagining a politics of relation BT - Glissant’s border thought and the German border JF - Tydskrif vir letterkunde N2 - This study explores the theoretical and political potentials of Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation and its approach to the issues of borders, migration, and the setup of political communities as proposed by his pensée nouvelle de la frontière (new border thought), against the background of the German migration crisis of 2015. The main argument of this article is that Glissant’s work offers an alternative epistemological and normative framework through which the contemporary political issues arising around the phenomenon of repressive border regimes can be studied. To demonstrate this point, this article works with Glissant’s border thought as an analytical lens and proposes a pathway for studying the contemporary German border regime. Particular emphasis is placed on the identification of potential areas where a Glissantian politics of relation could intervene with the goal of transforming borders from impermeable walls into points of passage. By exploring the political implications of his border thought, as well as the larger philosophical context from which it emerges, while using a transdisciplinary approach that borrows from literary and political studies, this work contributes to ongoing debates in postcolonial studies on borders and borderlessness, as well as Glissant’s political legacy in the twenty-first century. KW - Edouard Glissant KW - politics of relation KW - Germany KW - border regime Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.56i1.6271 SN - 0041-476X VL - 56 IS - 1 SP - 49 EP - 61 PB - University of Pretoria CY - Pretoria ER -