The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure. Asti Hustvedt
Some Similar Quotes
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  3. You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. - John Green

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More Quotes By Asti Hustvedt
  1. In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end — the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility — but the other side of...

  2. The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric — a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases — was transformed, through hypnosis,...

  3. Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world.. the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because...

  4. The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of...

  5. Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the...

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