Abstract
Focussing on the continuity of French décadence on the Iberian Peninsula, the doctoral thesis proposes an analysis of narrative literatures in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese from 1895 to 1914. Between the literary negotiation of aesthetic patterns and an ideological quest for national identity, it concentrates on narrative versions that aim
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at surmounting the “decadent” period and style and finding new vitalistic or optimistic fictional counterparts, but without abandoning the decadent set of literary topoi. Thus, different modalities of culturally translating décadence lead to the field of anti-decadentism and regeneration, both flexible terms dependent on the ideological system of each text. Between aesthetics and ideology, interferences about how to define “modernity” become crucial. The concept of translation as cultural negotiation helps to problematise the rewriting processes of both the historiographic and the aesthetic aspects of „decadence“ from France to the different Iberian literatures, in a complex triangle of cultural negotiation. This approach permits a deconstruction of the topics of Centre and Periphery and a dynamisation of the Iberian Peninsula as a multifaceted space, where both the European discourse patterns (modernism, decadentism) and the intra-European and intra-Iberian historical clichés (decadence as backwardness, Europe as progess etc.) are submitted to continuous re-semantisation. The focus lies on the structural continuity of décadence within the different versions of renewal (regeneration, renascence) in multiple narrative texts from authors like Martínez Ruiz, Ganivet, Baroja, Unamuno, Machado, Massó i Torrents, Casellas, Pous i Pagès, d’Ors, Russinyol, Eça de Queirós, Lopes Vieira and Teixeira de Pascoaes, these all being involved in a literary tendency to overcome decadent individualism and hyper-aestheticism for new (national) responsibility. The large cultural and linguistic scope places the different translational modalities at the centre of interest, and enlarges the literary corpus for this period, comparing texts from different Iberian cultures and from different literary schools or generations within a common epistemological frame. Already French literature shows décadence as an unstable aesthetic experiment, a deficient state tending towards fullfilment. In the Iberian texts, strategies of inversion, radical negation or desperate, violent elimination of the decadent imagery convey décadence as a subtext to diverging versions of regeneration. These modalities are analysed in three different areas: First, the overcoming of decadent, deficient subject constitution can induce a national(istic) perspective, while irony and hyperbole are ways of escaping the often too-linear inversion of decadence to vitalism. Second, regarding the spatial aspect of cultural negotiation, „decadence“ appears as a flexibly de- and replaceable attribution, excluded form the realm of the nation. Thirdly, sublimating the decadent substrate into mythical redemption, it is accepted as an underlying aesthetic potential. Traces of the décadence discourse within regenerative tendencies, and traces of French Décadence within the Iberian Peninsula, reveal a deeply interwoven literary space characterized by the creative rewriting of discursive modalities. Thus, the notion of “regeneration” in the Iberian Peninsula has to be resituated within the broader context of the multi-faceted complex of European “modernity”.
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