Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Jessica Gossling (Goldsmiths):
'Rooms and Reverie: Dislocations, correspondences and the hothouse'
Baudelaire is a poet of urban spaces who comments on the oscillation between the eternal and the ephemeral. This duality is also a paradox that is explored in the prose poem ‘The Double Room’ (‘La Chambre Double’, 1861). Baudelaire creates a sense of dislocation, linked to the modern urban experience of Haussmannised Paris, through compartmentalisation, correspondences between states and psychological unfixity; reflecting in the physical flux of the room the emotional fluttering of the narrator. This is combined with exotic scents and a stagnant atmosphere to create a hothouse environment within which the poet is depicted as an unnatural growth. This paper suggests that ‘The Double Room’, and the metaphor of the hothouse, can be used as ways of exploring the ephemeral nature of Baudelaire’s poetry as well as providing a starting point for Decadent evocations of the hothouse at the end of the century.
Alice Condé (Goldsmiths):
'Mirrors, shadows, dancing girls: the Decadent woman in Arthur Symons’s London Nights'
Arthur Symons’s poems in the 1895 collection London Nights are self-consciously reflexive, and consider the position of the writer and the act of writing, even as he writes. In his poetic accounts of dancing girls, Symons simultaneously places the poet in the audience and on the stage, as both subject and object of the poem, as in the ‘Prologue’. The dancing girl is symbolic of the agony of trying to capture the fleeting moment in poetry. The poetic voice of the ‘Prologue’ is frustrated by his own presence in the poem; as he tries to articulate the experience of watching the dancers on the music hall stage, he is met by his own image, ‘It is my very self I see / Across the cloudy cigarette’. Though his dancing girls are neither ‘fatale’ nor cruel, they are symbolic of torment, and this paper will suggest that Symons’s writing echoes the masochistic scenarios which define earlier incarnations of the Decadent femme fatale.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Feb 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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