| My dissertation considers the effects of industrial capitalism on the artist figure in European and Latin American narrative works. This comparative project explores a wide range of texts by Huysmans, Wilde, Dario, Silva, Wedekind, Schnitzler, and Mann in which the protagonists are artist figures forced to confront two related problems: the devaluation of the artist and the commodification of the artwork. By examining the fictional characters' responses to these challenges, I disclose the multifaceted relationship between art and capital, aesthetics and economics, in fin-de-siecle literature and culture.; These artist protagonists react in varying ways to the problems identified: some lament and become victimized by the market forces that call for mass production and consumption (Chapter l: The Artist as Producer, The Commodity as Art); others attempt to overcome the negative repercussions of capitalist society by turning themselves into artworks and thereby avoiding the production of some external art object (Chapter 2: The Artist as Aesthete, the Self as Art); still others protest the commodification of art by promoting a form of artistic criticism that recycles art objects and prevents them from existing as consumer goods (Chapter 3: The Artist as Critic, the Recycled as Art). Each chapter locates various critiques of commodity culture as well as important strategies for avoiding the conversion of the artist into a wage-laborer and of the artwork into an object of exchange. Together these texts reflect the battle between the ideal of art for art's sake and the reality of art for capital's sake, a battle being waged on both sides of the Atlantic from the European metropolises of Paris and London to the burgeoning new markets of Latin America.; By illuminating the dialogues and reciprocal influences between various regions, national literary traditions, and academic disciplines (literature, philosophy, and economics), my dissertation offers significant contributions to modernist scholarship. Moreover, given the fact that comparative studies between Europe and Latin America are seldom encountered, despite the important trans-Atlantic dialogues that took place in this precise historical moment, my research bridges the gap separating these continents and their respective social, economic, and aesthetic realities. |
