- Comparative Literature, German Literature and Culture, Fin de Siecle Literature & Culture, Anglo-German relations, Oscar Wilde, Fin de siècle Vienna, and 16 moreModernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Decadence (Literature), History of Sexuality, Theater History, Avant-Garde Theater, Dramaturgy, Opera, Aestheticism, Historiography (in Art History), Reception Studies, Franz Schreker, German Literature, French Literature, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, and Michel Foucaultedit
- Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. My work revolves around... moreAssociate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. My work revolves around cultural interactions between German-speaking and English-speaking Europeans at the turn of the 20th century. I’ve published on Wilde’s Italian Renaissance, on German news reports of his 1895 scandal, and on Wilde as a German gay icon. My current project examines how Wilde and his works were reimagined by German and Austrian composers, artists, playwrights, dancers, and directors before 1939edit
In October 1901, Max Reinhardt’s avant-garde Berlin cabaret ‘Schall und Rauch’ [‘Sound and Smoke’] added to its line-up a new skit entitled ‘Die Dekadenten’ [‘The Decadents’]. The piece was based on a parody of Decadent and Aestheticist... more
In October 1901, Max Reinhardt’s avant-garde Berlin cabaret ‘Schall und Rauch’ [‘Sound and Smoke’] added to its line-up a new skit entitled ‘Die Dekadenten’ [‘The Decadents’]. The piece was based on a parody of Decadent and Aestheticist sensibilities that had appeared in 1898 in the magazine Jugend [see Fig. 1]. In it, two young men lounge in a fin-de-siècle café, smoking, drinking absinthe ‘the way Verlaine used to’, and discussing the effects of specific colours on their nerves. After basking in the notion of a blue house with a green roof lit from within by a cadmium-yellow flickering light, the two barely escape dying of ‘an excess of bliss’ by getting up and leaving the café, carrying on their shoulders ‘the great weariness of the declining century’. The clichéd, overwrought Decadence of this 1898 vignette clearly still has traction in October 1901, as can be seen in a magazine illustration of Reinhardt’s ‘Schall und Rauch’ version [see Fig. 2]. Reinhardt had already lampooned ...
In 1877, as a 23-year-old Oxford undergraduate, Oscar Wilde was invited to fill out two pages of a ‘Confession Album’, an informal survey of his likes, dislikes, ambitions, and fears. Certain of his answers point to an already keen wit... more
In 1877, as a 23-year-old Oxford undergraduate, Oscar Wilde was invited to fill out two pages of a ‘Confession Album’, an informal survey of his likes, dislikes, ambitions, and fears. Certain of his answers point to an already keen wit (when asked the title of his favorite ‘book to take up for an hour’, he responds that he never takes up books for an hour), others to surprisingly conventional tastes (riding is a favorite amusement). The form also testifies to Wilde’s deep appreciation for all things Greek: his favorite authors include Plato, Sappho, and Theocritus; he would hate to part with his Euripides; he admires Alexander the Great. But when faced with a question regarding the place he would most like to live, Wilde chooses not Athens or Argos2 but ‘Florence and Rome’; and when asked about the historical period in which he would most liked to have lived, Wilde opts for ‘the Italian Renaissance’.3 As there is no room on the form for Wilde to expand on this statement, we can only speculate as to why he sees Renaissance Italy as a time and a place in which he would have felt at home. But what the response tells us for certain is that while he was at Oxford, Wilde found the culture of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italy particularly appealing, was comfortable imagining himself as part of that period, and was prepared to acknowledge his enthusiasm for the period to his friends.
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That the self could be fashioned during the Renaissance has been a topos of Renaissance historiography since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. In the Renaissance conceived of by nineteenth-century scholars, cultivated... more
That the self could be fashioned during the Renaissance has been a topos of Renaissance historiography since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. In the Renaissance conceived of by nineteenth-century scholars, cultivated personalities were a hallmark of the rise of individualism during the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento. Even in the late twentieth century Stephen Greenblatt could open his landmark study Renaissance Self-Fashioning with the observation that ‘in sixteenth-century England there were both selves and a sense that they could be fashioned’.3 This is a perception about the Renaissance, Greenblatt finds, that has been common since Jacob Burckhardt and Jules Michelet first wrote on the subject; it is a perception that owes its existence to the fact that in the sixteenth century ‘there appears to be an increased self- consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’.4
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When the aesthetic movement is characterized as having a de-humanizing impulse, the argument is generally based on the premise that “art for art’s sake” must be the opposite of “art for life’s sake”; that if—to use Peter Burger’s... more
When the aesthetic movement is characterized as having a de-humanizing impulse, the argument is generally based on the premise that “art for art’s sake” must be the opposite of “art for life’s sake”; that if—to use Peter Burger’s phrase—aestheticism made art the content of art (239), the realm which was sacrificed in that operation was life. While this may be the case for much of the output that we label aestheticist, a number of foundational texts of the aesthetic movement in fact privilege the human experience of the aesthetic object, and champion a mode of engaged reception that transforms, and is transformed by, art. Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde put the artistic receptor at the center of their aesthetic economy, rendering moot the question of whether the art object itself is utilitarian or useless, socially engaged or oblivious to the world, humanized or de-humanized.1 Regardless of the nature of the work of art, in Paterian aestheticism the role of the art critic is revitalized, his or her2 work imbued with precisely the “human qualities, personality, [and] spirit” that Merriam-Webster associates with the humanizing impulse.3
Research Interests: Art and Aestheticism
When in the 1830s Swiss milliner Heinrich Hossli attempted the first overarching apology for ‘Mannerliebe’—love between men—he justified his public discussion of a phenomenon that might generally arouse ‘a certain reticence, dread, and... more
When in the 1830s Swiss milliner Heinrich Hossli attempted the first overarching apology for ‘Mannerliebe’—love between men—he justified his public discussion of a phenomenon that might generally arouse ‘a certain reticence, dread, and repugnance’ by associating it with the much-admired legacy of ancient Greece.3 The Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato, the writings of Aristotle, and the thoughts of Xenophon are invoked repeatedly in Hossli’s Eros: Die Mannerliebe der Griechen in an effort to redeem the reputation of same-sex love, to distance it from the ‘horrific name’ of sodomy and the accusation of ‘boy-rape’ and to make it a topic worthy of intellectual inquiry.4 Sixty years and a revolution in sexology later, Oscar Wilde’s famous courtroom defense of ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’ seems still to be using the same tactic: by defining homophilic love as ‘a great affection of an elder for a younger man […] such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy’ Wilde is defending Mdnnerliebe in part by associating it with ancient Greek practices.5
Research Interests: Art and The Renaissance
Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the... more
Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence – the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.
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In 1973 Vita Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, published his mother’s remarkable account of her passionate and ultimately disastrous affair with Violet Trefusis, nee Keppel.2 Written in the early 1920s and discovered only after its... more
In 1973 Vita Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, published his mother’s remarkable account of her passionate and ultimately disastrous affair with Violet Trefusis, nee Keppel.2 Written in the early 1920s and discovered only after its author’s death, the piece related the ‘truth, as bleak as I can make it’ about the relationship, which started in 1904 when the girls were not yet in their teens and climaxed in their attempted elopement in 1919.3 Sackville-West describes how the two were so intrigued by one another the first time they met, that ‘[Violet] got her mother to ask mine to send me to tea. I went. We sat in a darkened room, and talked—about our ancestors, of all strange topics—and in the hall as I left she kissed me’.4 The author appears surprised at the memory of having first connected with Keppel over the subject of ancestors, but for anyone familiar with Sackville-West’s childhood passions or her early writings, no topic could seem less strange. The young Sackville-West ...
Research Interests: Art and The Renaissance
Research Interests: Transgender and German
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This chapter examines the Dublin production and critical reception of Christa Winsloe’s Children in Uniform, which ran to full houses at the Gate for three weeks in April 1934. The play, which deals with the love between a Prussian... more
This chapter examines the Dublin production and critical reception of Christa Winsloe’s Children in Uniform, which ran to full houses at the Gate for three weeks in April 1934. The play, which deals with the love between a Prussian schoolgirl and her female teacher, had premiered in Leipzig (1930), run successfully in Berlin (1931), and been adapted for the screen as Mädchen in Uniform (1931) before it was translated into English for a successful London run in 1932-1933. Edwards and mac Liammóir probably saw the original German play in Berlin in 1931. Using the prompt copy, lighting plots, photographs and reviews, the chapter shows how Edwards used expressionistic lighting and sonic leitmotifs to underscore the authoritarian regime within which the relationship between the women develops. In following the Berlin staging, Edwards produced a more subversive version of the play than that seen by London audiences or cinema goers.
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... patience. Rachel Goodyear made heroic efforts to improve my Teutonic syntax and turn it into readable Anglo-Saxon prose; for all remaining grammatical infelicities and intellectual contortions I must accept the blame. Without ...
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Toward the end of 1901, Thomas Mann set down in his notebook a love poem to his friend Paul Ehrenberg: What took so long? — Paralysis, barrenness, ice. And mind! And art! Here is my heart, and here is my hand I love you! My God … I love... more
Toward the end of 1901, Thomas Mann set down in his notebook a love poem to his friend Paul Ehrenberg: What took so long? — Paralysis, barrenness, ice. And mind! And art! Here is my heart, and here is my hand I love you! My God … I love you. Is it this beautiful, this sweet, this blessed to be human?2
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA is special issue is the fruition of the University of South Carolina's 12th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, entitled Bodies and held in Columbia on February 2527, 2010. With an emphasis on... more
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA is special issue is the fruition of the University of South Carolina's 12th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, entitled Bodies and held in Columbia on February 2527, 2010. With an emphasis on cross-cultural and ...
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This chapter examines the Dublin production and critical reception of Christa Winsloe’s Children in Uniform, which ran to full houses at the Gate for three weeks in April 1934. The play, which deals with the love between a Prussian... more
This chapter examines the Dublin production and critical reception of Christa Winsloe’s Children in Uniform, which ran to full houses at the Gate for three weeks in April 1934. The play, which deals with the love between a Prussian schoolgirl and her female teacher, had premiered in Leipzig (1930), run successfully in Berlin (1931), and been adapted for the screen as Mädchen in Uniform (1931) before it was translated into English for a successful London run in 1932-1933. Edwards and mac Liammóir probably saw the original German play in Berlin in 1931. Using the prompt copy, lighting plots, photographs and reviews, the chapter shows how Edwards used expressionistic lighting and sonic leitmotifs to underscore the authoritarian regime within which the relationship between the women develops. In following the Berlin staging, Edwards produced a more subversive version of the play than that seen by London audiences or cinema goers.