Decadence in La Muerte de Tadzio by Luis G. Martín
Main Article Content
Abstract
This article analyses the trope of decadence in Luis G. Martín’s novel La Muerte de Tadzio (2000), a follow-up of Thomas Mann’s acclaimed Der Tod in Venedig (1912). This work proposes a cultural encounter between the notion of decadence, as a transgression of social normativity and ideas of progress, and the antisocial strand of queer theory, specifically Lee Edelman’s criticism against reproductive futurity (2004). The analysis also draws on Leo Bersani’s conception of sexuality’s self-shattering impulse to discuss how this novel articulates notions of disease and death (1987). This essay evaluates how the novel depicts homosexual desire as the death drive, recapturing a negative cultural memory that re-emerges in contemporary fiction.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
References
Adair, Gilbert. (2001). The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ and the Boy Who Inspired It. Short Books.
Aldrich, Robert. (1993). The Seduction of the Mediterranean. Routledge.
Bersani, Leo. (1987). “Is the Rectum a Grave?”. October, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 197-222.
Bloom, Harold. (1973). The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford UP.
Clayton, Jay and Eric Rothstein, eds. (1991). Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. The University of Wisconsin Press.
Desmarais, Jane and Chris Baldick, eds. (2012). Decadence: An Annotated Anthology. Manchester UP.
Denisoff, Dennis. (2007). “Decadence and Aestheticism”. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin De Siècle, edited by Gail Marshall. Cambridge UP, pp. 31-52.
Downing, Lisa. (2004). “Beyond reasonable doubt: Aesthetic violence and motiveless murder in French Decadent fiction”. French Studies, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 189-203.
Duncan, Derek. (2006). Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference. Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Eagleton, Terry. (1995). “The Flight to the Real”. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. Cambridge UP, pp. 11-20.
Edelman, Lee. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP.
Edelman, Lee. (2007). “Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social”. South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 469-476.
Foucault, Michel. (1978). The History of Sexuality. Volume I: The Will to Knowledge. Penguin.
Gallop, Jane. (1982). “The Immoral Teachers”. Yale French Studies: The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre, no. 63, pp. 117-128.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP.
Gilman, Richard. (1979). Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Greenberg, David F. (1988). The Construction of Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. (2003). Against Nature (A Rebours). Penguin.
Kaye, Richard A. (2007). “Sexual Identity at the Fin De Siècle”. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin De Siècle, edited by Gail Marshall. Cambridge UP, pp. 53-72.
Labalme, Patricia H. (1984). “Sodomy and Venetian Justice in the Renaissance”. Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis, vol. 52, pp. 217-254.
Lane, Christopher. (1993). “Gay Tradition and the Anxiety of Influence”. Contemporary Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 293-303.
Mann, Thomas. (1990). Letters, 1889-1955. University of California Press.
Mann, Thomas. (1998). Death in Venice and Other Stories. Vintage.
Martín, Luis G. (2000). La muerte de Tadzio. Alfaguara.
Mira, Alberto. (2004). De Sodoma a Chueca: Una historia cultural de la homosexualidad en España en el siglo XX. Egales.
Piggford, George. (2000). “In Time of Plague: AIDS and Its Significations in Hervé Guibert, Tony Kushner, and Thom Gunn”. Cultural Critique, no. 44, pp. 169-196.
Porter, Laurence M. (1997). “Decadence and the Fin-de-siècle Novel”. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present, edited by Timothy Unwin. Cambridge UP, pp. 93-110.
Rubin, Gayle S. (1993). “Thinking Sex”. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove et al. Routledge, pp. 3-44.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press.
Smuga, Łukasz. (2022). Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels. Routledge.
Sharrock, Cath. (1997). “Pathologizing Sexual Bodies”. Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, edited by Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Munt. Cassell.
Sontag, Susan. (1991). Illness as Metaphor / AIDS And its Metaphors. Penguin.
Tobin, Robert D. (2012). “Queering Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig”. Thomas Mann. Neue kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüren, edited by Stefan Börnchen et al. Wilhelm Fink, pp. 67-80.
Webber, Andrew J. (2002). “Mann’s Man’s World”. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson. Cambridge UP, pp. 64-83.
Wilper, James P. (2016). Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German. Purdue UP.