Oscar Wilde:Art&EthicsofLife

Catalog description

This course examines the life, literary works, and ethical perspectives of the Irish writer Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900). In January 1895, Wilde remarked self-deprecatingly to the French writer André Gide, “I have put all my genius into my life: I have put only my talent into my works.” Later, after having been sent to prison for two years on the charge of “gross indecency” (under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885), Wilde consoled himself by declaring (somewhat less modestly), “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.” In this class, we shall investigate the implications of Wilde’s claim about his emblematic “relations to the art and culture” of his time, and the complex processes by which he drew upon his life to create art and upon art to shape his life. In addition, since the questioning of gender roles and of sexual orientation is at the heart of Wilde’s life and literature, we shall investigate these topics throughout the course, to understand both the sexual conventions that Wilde sought to challenge in his own time and the effect that his trials, tribulations, and artistic triumphs have had upon our contemporary discourses of gender and sexual orientation.