Summary
Using the example of the fin‐de‐siècle German Reich, this article outlines how insomnia emerged as a “disease of civilisation” in an industrialising society, defined by time‐specific notions, ...reflecting and strengthening the social norms of the time. Furthermore, it analyses the process of individualisation and flexibilisation that transferred the social struggles and economic demands of modernity onto the subject's body or soul. The history of insomnia around 1900 thus reveals a pattern of thought that shaped the understanding of the insomniac throughout the 20th century.
Les auteurs et artistes des dernières décennies du XIXe siècle montrent une évidente obsession eschatologique, qu’elle concerne le déclin de la nation, de la civilisation, ou de l’humanité tout ...entière. Cette inquiétude se décline en une poétique et une esthétique de la finitude que la « décadence » désigne comme un mot-totem. Pourtant, cette fin-de-siècle, qui se croit à la fin de tout, puise dans les nouveaux savoir portés sur les origines (préhistoire, évolutionnisme) les ferments de ses visions apocalyptiques. Il s’agira, dans cette étude, de comprendre l’implication des connaissances sur les débuts des temps dans l’imaginaire de la fin des temps. Car, dès lors que cette culture se positionne sur l’échelle de l’espèce qu’invitent à penser ces nouveaux savoirs, il semblerait que mourir, ce n’est pas tant « partir beaucoup », pour reprendre le trait plaisant d’Alphonse Allais, c’est peut-être et avant tout revenir.
This paper addresses the fin-de-siècle period as a time when most of what are called intermedial processes, that is to say, those processes that arbitrate aesthetic design at the intersection between ...different media, began to play a substantial role in the production of cultural artifacts. The epoch is investigated through the prism of intermediality, which manifested itself as a valuable tool in the development of the arts and media, particularly after the birth of photography and cinematography. These intermedial processes fostered a media-based creative experimentation that culminated in the modernist and postmodernist movements. The role of intermediality in the fin-de-siècle, particularly in light of the syncretic processes it originated, is considered as an aftereffect of the tumultuous events of the time, which in a way acted as a stimulus for this new-fangled aesthetics. The paper concludes that the turbulence that characterizes this epoch, as well as the diffusion of new artistic and philosophical movements, impacted the development of mixed (intermedial) arts, stimulated their growth and activated the exploration of intermedial forms and genres in all the arts. This is the era of mass publishing and the growth of literacy rates, an era that laid the foundations for future theories on intertextuality and the idea of the work of art as an inclusive “canvas” inside of which all media have a place.
Cette étude aborde les récits brefs d’anticipation parus dans la presse entre 1860 et 1940 qui traitent de sexualité. Trois veines distinctes de cette thématique sont envisagées en fonction de leur ...effet littéraire et pragmatique : l’anticipation gauloise, érotico-pornographique et fantaisiste.
This paper analyses two stories by Henry James and two others by Max Beerbohm whose protagonists are, at the same time, writers and ghosts. Such a diegetic scenario is interesting because it seems to ...point at a disguised metaliterary treatment of current ideas about fin de siècle authoriality and a peculiar metalepsis of the concept of the death of the author, later popularized in post-structuralist France. After a contextualization of Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s dissimilar but equally significant contribution to the genre of the ‘Decadent short story’, the discourse turns to the features of their writer-ghosts, in order to retrace not only their conjunctural literary value, but also their fascinating impact on aesthetical matters.
Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), the focus of this article, is usually credited with starting the yoga renaissance in the late nineteenth century. The text marks a watershed moment in yoga ...history when Vivekananda translated and popularised the ancient Indian Yoga Sutras by the sage Patanjali as part of anti-colonial intercultural exchanges between east and west in the fin de siècle. The book’s transnational discourse drew from contemporary new physics and neo-Vedantic philosophy as well as Indian nationalism, pre-Freudian psychology, Western occultism, and modern ideas about physical health, and it issued a radical alternative to the binary oppositions on which imperialist and materialist ideologies rely. Vivekananda elucidates Patanjali’s yogic philosophy but, significantly, he also outlines a practical methodology for achieving Raja yoga’s goal of universal unity. He sets out a praxis that gradually breaks down the boundaries between mind and body, matter and energy, subject and object, and thereby transforms the individual in powerful and positive ways. It was an idealistic goal that appealed to various groups of unconventional heterodox thinkers at the fin de siècle, and it arguably contributed to the spiritual and political revolution that spread in subcultural forms, across Europe and America from the second half of the nineteenth century onward (Gandhi 2006: 121).
En el contexto histórico finisecular se comenzaron a tender puentes y a establecer movimientos de aproximación entre España y el “Nuevo Mundo" mediante la creación de sociedades e iniciativas ...socio-políticas y culturales que posibilitaran la apertura de conexiones artísticas entre las dos orillas del Atlántico. En el seno de un nuevo entorno histórico, esta investigación, centrada en la promoción de entrelazamientos literarios transoceánicos encabezada por Blanca de los Ríos, tiene como objetivo examinar las acciones culturales, postulados ideológicos y misiones americanistas alentadas por la escritora andaluza, con el fin de entretejer e impulsar lazos artísticos e intelectuales entre España y los países hispanoamericanos.
