Carolina Seminar • The Belgian and Czech Decadent Novels between Gothicization and Colonialism in the 1890s

The seminar is pleased to welcome back Dr. Petra James, who will present the attached paper, entitled The Belgian and Czech Decadent Novels between Gothicization and Colonialism in the 1890s: Bruges la Morte (1892) by Georges Rodenbach and A Gothic Soul (1900) by Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic.

Petra James (Université libre de Bruxelles) will discuss two key decadent novels as tools for Czech and Belgian national self-determination through the aesthetic process of Gothicization. Her paper studies how the resurgence of a “Gothic” past in these modernist reinterpretations was driven by national assertions against the dominant French and the German aesthetic models, but she also interprets their Gothicizing modernist strategies as a tool to reaffirm national identity. Inspired by John Ruskin and modernist painters, the Gothic re-affirmed a medieval past while urging semi-peripheral territories, such as Belgium and Bohemia, to tap into their own cultural wealth and local authenticity through a Gothicization of their literature, arts, and crafts. Gothicization, however, was also a means of obscuring the colonial nature of Belgium during the symbolist modern period and the Czechs’ ambiguous relationship to the exotic Other, often depicted in dehumanizing and misogynist ways. This paper thus breaks new ground by pondering the question of “colonial innocence” of Central Europe of the modernist period.

The seminar series is co-sponsored by the Carolina Seminar Program, the UNC Department of History, the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies, and the Central Asia Working Group. Please note that the participants will give an overview of their projects, but will not read a formal paper. Instead, papers or book chapters will be circulated ahead of time to those who are interested in attending and participating in the discussion. Please contact Dr. Eren Tasar for more information (etasar@email.unc.edu).