und Amerikanistik
Gastvortrag am 08.05.2023Arthur Symons and Maurice Maeterlinck: Symbolism and the Concept of Fate
3. Mai 2023, von JH und IP
am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, hält Dr. James Douthwaite (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) im Rahmen des Doktorand:innenkolloquiums von Prof. Berns und Prof. Rohr einen Vortrag. Der Vortrag beginnt um 18 Uhr c.t. in Raum Ü35-02019 und trägt den Titel "Arthur Symons and Maurice Maeterlinck: Symbolism and the Concept of Fate”. Wer Interesse und Zeit hat, ist herzlich willkommen.
Arthur Symons and Maurice Maeterlinck: Symbolism and the Concept of Fate
Images of fate abounded at the end of the nineteenth century. From Pre-Raphaelite paintings of destiny or the Moirai to the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne or Paul Verlaine to the competiting reflections of Friedrich Nietzsche or Arthur Schopenhauer, the concept was ubiquitous. In my work I explore the particular ways in which writers in the aesthetic and decadent tradition incorporated the concept within their literary and artistic practice. In this talk I will focus on Arthur Symons.
Though his star fell dramatically in the modernist period itself, Symons was a major writer of the 1890s, and the leading critic of the English fin de siecle. His The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) came to be one of the defining works of the era,. Symons argues that Symbolism was the development of a mystical style, the representation of the ineffable by means of sensual, and at the heart of his conception of the symbolist mystic was the Belgian playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, one of the most prolific writers on fate. I argue that through Maeterlinck, Symons developed a sophisticated notion of fate as a primarily aesthetic concept.
James Dowthwaite teaches English literature at the University of Jena, where he is currently completing a Habilitation on the concept of fate in aestheticist, symbolist, and decadent writing. His first book, Ezra Pound and 20th Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word (Routledge, 2019) won the Ezra Pound Society Book Award. He has also published on Walter Pater, Arthur Schopenhauer, T.S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle, literature and anthropology, the concept of Persona, and other things. Together with Melissa Sarikaya he runs a network on modernism, aestheticism and decadence, and is an associate editor at the NASJ: A Forum.