This collection of fifteen essays looks at the theme of decadence and its recurring manifestations in European literature and literary criticism from medieval times to the present day. Various definitions of the term are explored, including the notion of decadence as physical decay. Some of the essays draw parallels between modernist and postmodernist notions of decadence. Similarities are detected between fin de siècle decadence at the end of the nineteenth century (which reaches its apotheosis in the character of Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend) and depictions of decadence in our own age as we enter the new millennium.
Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.
Differential marking as applied to direct objects has long been discussed as one of the characterizing traits of many Romance languages. There is, however, wide consensus that a detailed investigation into the nature of this phenomenon raises numerous challenges both at the empirical and theoretical level. Many questions are still being raised regarding which precise morpho-syntactic strategies count as differential object marking, whether the data can be unified, and, subsequently, how they are to be unified formally and theoretically. Additionally, a thorough investigation of this phenomenon is still needed for many Romance languages and especially at the micro-variation level. This volume brings together original papers addressing various aspects of differential object marking in Romance languages, focusing on micro-variation, from both a descriptive and formal perspective, touching on diachrony, language contact, synchrony, and using a large set of methodologies.
This volume presents recent theoretical research on Romance languages, selected from papers presented at the 25th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. It includes studies of individual Romance languages as well as comparative studies both within the Romance family and with non-Romance languages (Basque, Bulgarian, Germanic and Quechua). Papers in phonetics and phonology treat stress, syllable structure, s-weakening, and the declination effect. Morphological topics include class-marker suppression and gender agreement and suppletion. Topics in syntactic theory include clitics, participial and adjectival agreement, the syntax of tense, mood, negation, adjectival predication, Tough-constructions, quantification and null objects.
