Ascending decadence: A comparative study of dilemmas and pleasures in Japanese and Italian anti-modern literary discourses

This dissertation examines the significance of the notion of "decadence" within the historical framework of Modernism, especially in Italy and Japan, which were latecomers to modernity. In contrast to the major corpus of fin-de-siecle Decadence, which portrays decadence fundamentally as the subjectively constructed refutation of modern material and cultural conditions, the writers of decadent literature in Italy and Japan employ the concept of decadence differently in their process of rendering the modern self and subjectivity in literary discourse. While mainstream fin-de-siecle Decadence generally treats the subject as an a priori condition for its aesthetics, these writers on modernity's periphery incorporate heterogeneous spectrums of human consciousnesses into their narratives, and thereby express their own perspectives on the complexities inherent in the formation of modern subjectivity.;Examining historical as well as cultural causalities attributable to the conditions of decadence, such as psychological or mental degeneration, immorality, and excessive self-indulgence, this project argues that the perennial phenomena of decadence reflect the prevalence of a regulatory or totalitarian superstructure whose effect is to stifle, and, paradoxically, to promote the birth of self-awareness as modern individualism. The literary discourse of decadence by the latecomers to modernity clearly replaces any fixed singularity of subjectivity by multiplicities of consciousnesses.;This dissertation analyzes morphologies of decadent subjectivities in selected works of Italian and Japanese decadent literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the formation of the subject, these works commonly engage issues of the reevaluation and valorization of anti-modern and non-utilitarian thoughts, and the incorporation of cultural and ontological heterogeneities into indigenous literatures. These characteristics shed new light on decadent literature's hermetic mission. The multifarious phases in decadent subjectivities help to articulate modern individuals' disquietudes about the totalitarian tendencies in modern social life. Under the regulatory framework of the scientific objectification of human beings, these Italian and Japanese discourses of decadence, constructed from the perspectives of the socio-cultural periphery, facilitate our understanding of individuals' consciousnesses of modernity.