Fin de Siecle: Once More With Feeling - Walter Laqueur
Last week, after much anticipation, excitement and nerves, I finally enrolled on the MA English Literature course at the University of Sheffield. Naively, I thought that the year it will take me to gain this qualification would be roughly of equal workload to the final year of my undergraduate degree (ie not a lot) and the more emails I get to my shiny new University of Sheffield account, the more I’m realising I was very, very wrong. Very wrong indeed. And it is horrifying. The modules I’ve chosen for the first semester (between now and Christmas for those who don’t know) are The Rise of the Gothic 1780 - 1890 and The Fin de Siecle. I don’t know what I was or wasn’t expecting in terms of reading but OH MY GOD there’s a lot. Especially for the latter module, Fin de Siecle.
The first reading assignment of which has been to plough through the 42 page article in Journal of Contemporary History, Fin de Siecle: Once More With Feeling by Walter Laqueur. This is apparently considered “light” reading to ease us into the swing of things. I personally do not consider this to be “light” reading at all. In fact I consider this to be rather heavy going for the first week of the course, especially considering the density of the subject at hand.
As I started reading I was enthusiastically making notes about how the term “Fin de Siecle” is symbolically synonymous for “morbidity, decline, decadence and cultural pessimism” and various philosophers have discussed what the Fin de Siecle meant and concluded that it was rooted in “degeneration and hysteria”, which actually is a fancier way of describing the subject matter of the dissertation I wrote for my BA, which discussed the hysterical fear of racial degeneration through reverse colonisation and xenophobia. Having read a few texts from the Fin de Siecle period, I was glad to see The Picture of Dorian Gray referred to as this is one of my favourites and because I could relate the arguments I felt that I was keeping up with what was being discussed.
The article also talked about the “Fin de Siecle” as being a phenomenon of fashion - suddenly having an attitude bent in a somewhat apocalyptic direction was an attractive attribute - and I can definitely relate this back to the texts that I have read from the period. After all, if such an attitude were not popular, would these texts have found an audience?
The problem I had with this article was that after the first 15 or so pages (which I had to read directly from the internet after failing to download it into a format that I could print - remember I’m technically challenged), it ceased to talk about the Fin de Siecle, which is most famed as the period between around 1880 and the turn of the century, and started discussing Postmodernism, which even if Laqueur says it was a term starting to be used around the 1880s, wasn’t defined or popularised until the 1970s almost a century later. It also started referring to the Third World, cultural studies, the different schools of modern criticism (New Historicism, Feminism, Deconstruction etc) and talking about Derrida. So what, pray tell, do Postmodernism and all these other very much 20th century entities have to do with the anxieties and apocalyptic attitudes of the bourgeois youth of the latter end of the 19th century? Frankly, I stopped reading before I found out.
I suppose I will discover in my seminar tomorrow how important the chunk I omitted to read was and I sincerely hope that it won’t bear much relevance because then I won’t feel too clever, but I have more important tasks at hand for the moment. I have to try and conquer the challenge of persuading JSTOR articles to download into a printable format so I don’t have to endure a horror like this afternoon again.
Fin de Siecle: Once More With Feeling by Walter Laqueur in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 31 No. 1 (January 1996) London: Sage Publications pp.5-47 cited on www.jstor.org on 27th September 2010
